Through the Interface

Autonomous drone navigation for Autodesk Photo on ReCap 360

I’ve been getting very interested in the field of autonomous robot navigation, of late. I own a couple of different robots: while I haven’t quite gotten around to buying a robotic vacuum cleaner, I’ve had an autonomous lawn mower for several years, now, and bought a simple LEGO-carrying programmable robot for my kids for Christmas. One of the reasons I find the field of autonomous robot navigation so interesting is that there’s a great deal of overlap with the algorithms and techniques needed for 3D reconstruction: robots need to sense their environment – often using photo or video input... Read more →

ReCap API article on ProgrammableWeb

Just a quick post to finish up the week: over on ProgrammableWeb, there’s a nice article talking about the new ReCap Photo Web API and how a number of developers are making use of it to drive interesting new categories of application, such as products creating designs for custom hearing aids or automating the 4D capture of construction sites. Really cool stuff. We’ll be talking more about web APIs over the coming weeks. Watch this space! Read more →

Attaching geo-location data to an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

AutoCAD’s geo-location API is a topic I’ve been meaning (and even promising) to cover for some time now. So here we are. :-) The below code sample is based on one shown at ADN’s DevDays tour at the end of 2013 – for the AutoCAD 2014 release – but the API ended up not being fully usable (at least as far as I recall: someone should jump in and correct me if I have this wrong) until the 2015 release. I’ve taken the opportunity to use Editor.Command() to call a couple of commands synchronously – to turn on the... Read more →

Thinking about security – Part 2

In the first post in this series, we talked a little about product security in AutoCAD and why having a JavaScript API doesn’t make AutoCAD less secure. We also took the chance to talk about the SECURELOAD mechanism, mainly saying that it’s a good thing. Today we’re going to talk about why it’s such a good thing. The various product teams at Autodesk have been very focused on improving security in our products over the last couple of years. We’ve hired a number of key security-focused architects and engineers who are working to improve the level of security we... Read more →

8 years

I woke up this morning thinking “it’s about that time of year”. Sure enough, it was eight years ago today that I made the first post to this blog. [This reminds me that the blog really could use a face-lift, if only for my photograph: I keep meaning to get a new profile snap taken, as I now have significantly more facial hair… nothing too crazy, just a small part of my ongoing southerly follicular migration ;-). And as I’m bound to look older – especially as I’ll forgo the Photoshopping my photographer friend insisted on, last time around... Read more →

Thinking about security – Part 1

We’ve been getting some interesting responses back from the AutoCAD Security Survey that has been posted over on the AutoCAD Futures beta forum. (If you haven’t already responded, we’d appreciate you taking the time to do so: it’ll probably take you less time than reading the rest of this blog post. Then please come back and finish reading this, too. ;-) The survey is intended to gauge whether the safeguards we first introduced in AutoCAD 2013 SP1 (and then further enhanced with the SECURELOAD mechanism in AutoCAD 2014) are properly understood and considered valuable. From some of the feedback... Read more →

Some useful webinars

Back in May I pre-announced a couple of webinars that I thought to be of interest to readers of this blog. The first was about ReCap, the second was about posting apps to Autodesk Exchange. The ReCap webinar was actually the beginning of series: at the time of writing five have now taken place (recordings are available for the first four) and two are remaining. Tomorrow’s webinar on “Capturing 3D reality data by flying a camera on a UAV” looks very interesting: after eventually managing to catch up with the edX class I signed up for on “navigation for... Read more →

3 things I learned at last week’s Technical Summit

The Autodesk Technical Summit is an annual, internal, 2-day technical conference for members of Autodesk’s engineering staff. I’ve been lucky enough to attend since 2011 (the first was held in 2010), and have seen the event grow both in breadth and attendance, over the years: this year there were 500 attendees from around the world and some really excellent presentations. Most years I’ve been at the event as a presenter (I talked about F# in 2011, Kinect in 2012 and then both Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion in 2013): this is the first time I was there purely as... Read more →

Iterating AutoCAD system variables using .NET – Part 2

In the last post we saw some code to exercise to two available system variable enumeration mechanisms in AutoCAD, SystemObjects.Variables and the new SystemVariableEnumerator class. Today we’re going to take a closer look at these two mechanisms, briefly comparing their performance and results. I took some code from this previous post to measure elapsed time, deleting the “runs” database to simplify the code once I’d realised the performance was basically comparable. Here’s the C# code, with the updated ESV and ESV2 commands which now create correspondingly named .txt files in c:\temp, rather than printing the results to the command-line... Read more →

Iterating AutoCAD system variables using .NET – Part 1

On my flight across to Toronto, I took another look at the “What’s New in AutoCAD 2015” section of the .NET API documentation and decided to dig into the new SystemVariableEnumerator implementation. I was particularly curious about this feature as there is already a way to get access to system variables via the Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime.SystemObjects.Variables collection. As an initial look at these two classes, I decided to put together a couple of simple variable iterator commands that use the same function to print out some information concerning the system variables exposed by each collection. Here’s the C# code implementing two... Read more →

Toronto

I’m nearing the end of my trip to Toronto: our annual internal Technical Summit was a great success – there were 500 attendees, this year, and as always is a really good opportunity to find out about other parts of the organisation and to meet new people – and today I’ve been hanging out at a specially hosted open house at Autodesk’s King Street office. To mark the end of the summit, last night there was an event at the Ontario Science Centre, where we had lots of fun experimenting with some interesting “reality capture” technology. They had a... Read more →

Autodesk Screencast

There’s been an interesting project on Autodesk Labs for some time, now, called Project Chronicle. It allows you to document use of Autodesk software, whether to provide support, training or – for that matter – to blog about it. Anyway, this technology has now graduated from Autodesk Labs and is available as Autodesk Screencast. It seemed like a good time to take it for a spin. Autodesk Screencast is about both creating recordings but also the hosting mechanism required to serve these up. If you go to the web-site you can download the recording tool but also see a... Read more →

Mountains and MOOCs

Last week was very quiet for me: starting with Memorial Day in the US meant a gentle start for me in Europe, too, and the week ended on Wednesday evening as we then had our own long weekend for Ascension, here in Switzerland. It was nice to have some time off just before a work trip: I’m getting up before dawn tomorrow to head across to Toronto for Autodesk’s annual internal Technical Summit (generally a really interesting and useful event – I’m very much looking forward to it). Over the last few years – as those of you who... Read more →