Through the Interface

Sharing and embedding A360 models

In advance of next week’s AU, our Cloud Platforms team has released a new version of A360. The key feature of this update is the ability to share and embed A360 models. I uploaded a new model to my A360 account – it works with existing models, too, of course, but it’s nice to show something different – and can already see the new “Share” button at the bottom of the model’s description in the activity feed. (The button is also available at the top of the viewer screen and as an icon in the data view, in case.)... Read more →

The 2015 Autodesk Cloud Accelerator

Autodesk’s Cloud Platforms team is running an interesting “incubator” program to encourage software developers to create applications that leverage Autodesk’s PaaS layer. (This currently includes the View & Data, AutoCAD I/O, Autodesk Fusion 360, Autodesk BIM 360 and Autodesk ReCap 360 web-service APIs.) I won’t go into the details – you can get them here – but I will call out the important points as I see them. 2 weeks of working on your cloud-integrated app in Autodesk’s San Francisco office March 9-20, 2015 Autodesk experts on hand to help Open to all, but there’s limited capacity 14 companies... Read more →

Stereoscopy

I’ve long been fascinated by stereoscopy, as I suspect is the case for most people lucky enough to have two functioning eyes. There’s something magical about a device that immerses us in a three dimensional scene by hijacking that fundamental input mechanism of ours, binocular vision. I almost always get that “oh wow” feeling: it just never gets old. I also happen to like collecting cool bits of vintage technology, although in an admittedly haphazard and opportunistic way: I have printing blocks, a typewriter, a TI-57 programmable calculator, an Apple Newton, a Palm Pilot and an iPAQ, to name... Read more →

Project Memento now has direct handheld scanning

Some exciting news from the Reality Computing team: Project Memento – which has been updated to v1.0.11.3 on Autodesk Labs – now supports direct input from the Artec 3D Eva scanner. You can scan a 3D object or scene – generating a mesh – directly in the Memento software. I’ve been hoping/waiting for this to happen for some time. Here’s a quick GIF showing – in broad strokes – how the process works. I’ve basically put a bunch of screenshots together – these were captured manually rather than at regular intervals – to show the flow in a lightweight... Read more →

AU 2014 Handout: Using SensorTag as a Low-Cost Sensor Array for AutoCAD

[This handout is for “SD5013 - Using SensorTag as a Low-Cost Sensor Array for AutoCAD”, a 60-minute class I’ll be presenting at AU 2014. Here’s the sample project that accompanies this handout.] Introducing SensorTag SensorTag is a $25 device containing a number of sensors – an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a thermometer, a hygrometer and a barometer – that communicates to a monitoring system (whether an iOS or Android mobile device or a Windows or Linux PC) via Bluetooth 4.0 (also known as Bluetooth Smart or Bluetooth Low Energy – BLE). Texas Instruments have packaged their CC2541 sensor... Read more →

Giveaway: Retrospecs, an iOS app for fans of retro computing

Every so often I get an attack of nostalgia for the early days of personal computing. The latest bout was triggered by the discovery of an app called Retrospecs, an iOS-based image processing app that transforms photos to use the colour palettes of 8- and 16-bit computers. The latest release – v1.7 – supports the following emulations: Teletext Apple ][ (Low res) Atari 2600 (NTSC) Intellivision IBM CGA (6 variations) BBC Micro (Mode 1 & 2) Sinclair ZX Spectrum Commodore 64 (Low res & high res modes) Colecovision Dragon 32 (PMODE 3) Thomson TO7 MSX (Screen mode 2 and... Read more →

.NET goes open source | Machine learning with F#

Taking a rest from my AU prep, I headed across to Zurich last night for an F# meetup focused on machine learning. Primarily because I’m interested in machine learning as a field but also because it seemed a good opportunity to dust off my F# skills. It was interesting to be on the train when the news from the first day of Microsoft’s Connect(); event hit the airwaves: the main headline being that .NET is going open source and cross-platform. Yes, folks, it’s actually happening: .NET 5 is going to be supported on Linux and OS X. And .NET... Read more →

VS2012 debugger type visualizers for ObjectARX

The C++ developers among you may remember the autoexp.dat file, which tells older versions of Visua... Read more →

Time to go Git

I’ve been chewing on this for some time, now, but I’ve decided it’s time to act. Well, as soon as AU is over I’ll act, anyway. Which I expect means it’ll morph into a New Year’s resolution for 2015. :-) Back when this blog was launched, the Git project was still relatively young. But it’s clearly become the version control technology to use, especially when putting code out there in the open. And this blog is all about putting stuff out there in the open, after all. Autodesk is using GitHub for our PaaS samples – which for now... Read more →

Displaying a graph of AutoCAD drawing objects using JavaScript and .NET

It seems like I’ve been living in JavaScript land (and no, I deliberately didn’t say “hell” – it’s actually been fun :-) for the last few weeks, between one thing or another. But I think I’ve finally put the finishing touches on the last of the JavaScript API samples I’ve prepared for AU 2014. This sample was inspired by Jim Awe – an old friend and colleague – who is working on something similar for another platform. So I can’t take any credit for the way it works, just for the plumbing it took to make it work with... Read more →

Adding more speech recognition to our stereoscopic Google Cardboard viewer

One of the pieces of feedback I received from internal folk on the prototype VR app I developed for Google Cardboard and then added voice recognition to was “it’d be really cool to add ViewCube-like navigation commands”. Which basically meant adding “front”, “back”, “left”, “right”, “top” & “bottom” to the list of voice commands recognised by annyang and have them hooked up to a function that changes the view accordingly. The main complication being the fact that some models come in with “Z up” despite the majority having “Y up”. Hopefully none will come in with “X up”, an... Read more →

What would you use AutoCAD I/O for?

In last week’s post on the winner of the “dashboard” competition, I suggested I’d follow up with a post we could all use to gather suggestions for using AutoCAD I/O. This is that post. Here are some potential Activities (or uses of the AutoCAD I/O service) that the AutoCAD I/O team brainstormed during a recent internal discussion: Translation e.g. DWG to PDF or image formats, or the other direction Object property extraction Block attribute extraction CAD standards reporting/enforcement Drawing cleanup Audit/recovery service Anti-malware service Some of these are a little nebulous or speculative – particularly in the latter half... Read more →