Through the Interface

Adding wiggle to jigsaw puzzles in AutoCAD using .NET

After seeing some code to create basic jigsaws in AutoCAD – and then a quick look at fabricating them using a laser cutter – in today’s post we’re adding a “wiggle” factor, making the shape of the tabs more unique than in the prior version of the application. This has been integrated into the existing JIG and JIGL commands, but we’ve also added a new command called WIGL, which applies a wiggle to the tabs of existing jigsaws (it basically checks the selection for splines with 6 fit points and runs our algorithm against those). The amount of wiggle... Read more →

Puzzling over laser cutters

After introducing a rudimentary program to help build jigsaw puzzles, we needed to fabricate the design in some way. As mentioned originally, we quickly discarded the idea to 3D print it as too time-consuming and unreliable: we decided to at least investigate using a laser cutter, what I considered to be a more natural choice for this. Now I did have some experience of using the laser cutter at our local Fab Lab, but as we wanted to iterate quickly – and didn’t have the fixed requirement of the larger cutting bed – we opted to use a slightly... Read more →

Autodesk Answer Days kick off with AutoCAD on May 7th

Autodesk is running a series of “Answer Days”, where you can get answers to your product questions directly – and hopefully in real-time – from Autodesk’s development and support teams. The first is for AutoCAD and will run from 6am and 6pm Pacific. It’s not just about the product, either. The ADN team will also be participating in this event, handling any questions you have around AutoCAD’s APIs. To get answers during the event, it’s as simple as logging into the AutoCAD Community and creating a post on the AutoCAD Answer Day board on May 7th. If you have... Read more →

Creating jigsaw puzzles inside AutoCAD using .NET

Too. Much. Fun. As mentioned in the last post, a colleague came to me with a problem… for an internal team-building exercise, he needed to manufacture a circular, 60-piece jigsaw puzzle with 6 groups of 10 pieces, each of which should be roughly the same size. The pieces will also have some text engraved on them, but that’s a minor detail. I searched the darkest corners of the Internet to find an online tool to generate a pattern for this, but then realised I’d spend my time more effectively by writing one myself and sharing it here. So that’s... Read more →

Extracting help IDs for AutoCAD’s UI Finder

In the last post we looked at some simple JavaScript code to automate AutoCAD’s UI Finder, locating a sequence of commands in the ribbon. In this post we’re going to look at how to generate a more extensive list directly from AutoCAD’s documentation. The first step I took was to download and install the offline help for AutoCAD 2016. This gives us a set of HTML and JavaScript files in a local folder (c:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2016 Help/English/Help on my system). To parse the files I ended up using some old-school UNIX commands via my OS X environment (which shares... Read more →

Invoking AutoCAD’s UI Finder from JavaScript

On my flight back from Singapore I started thinking about how an app might help people discover what’s new in the AutoCAD UI from release to release. This might also work for custom functionality, but that’s not (currently) my main concern. I was thinking of displaying some kind of palette that cycles through the new commands and features in a release, highlighting the associated ribbon buttons, etc., using the AutoCAD help system’s excellent UI Finder capability. Over the weekend I started looking at how it might work – whether it was possible to call the UI Finder from an... Read more →

AU2015 Call for Proposals opens next week

The countdown for Autodesk University 2015 starts with the Call for Proposals opening on April 22nd. It will remain open until May 26th. I have a few ideas for possible topics to present at this year’s event… Virtual Reality using Autodesk’s View & Data API Developing JavaScript applications for AutoCAD using TypeScript Processing drawings in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O They all seem to be valid topics, but we’ll see if I can find the energy and motivation to submit all three. If you have an opinion on what you’d like to hear me talk about – even if... Read more →

New versions of Autodesk’s Reality Computing products

A couple of updates from our Reality Solutions team… Firstly, a new, expanded portfolio of ReCap products is now available for download. They include the newly branded ReCap 360 Ultimate – previously known as ReCap Pro. For more information head on over to this blog post. Secondly, Autodesk Memento has been updated to version 1.0.15.10. Here’s what’s new in this release: Live update mechanism to deliver minor updates in the future Extrude a boundary Surface Sculpt Smart selection to select planar & organic surfaces with strokes Photo validator to check for photos that will not stitch Ability to toggle... Read more →

A dream come true

Today’s my birthday, which I’m spending with a fairly intense work schedule here in Singapore. My family gave me my present early on Saturday night, before I flew out on Sunday morning. To my absolute delight, it’s a Stormtrooper onesy, which I suspect is going to soon become my preferred WFH uniform. There’s a reason I’m looking so happy. When I was growing up there were children who wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo during our Star Wars re-enactments. I wanted to be a Stormtrooper. Which I have no doubt says something very important about my personality.... Read more →

First impressions of the FARO Freestyle3D scanner

Back when FARO announced their new Freestyle3D handheld scanner, I contacted them to see whether they might have one for me to take a look at. They very kindly obliged, and a few weeks ago I received a loaner model in the post. I won’t be writing an exhaustive review – at least not in this post – but I did want to share my first impressions, mainly to capture them for future discussion. Bear in mind that most of what I’m writing here is personal opinion and the rest is pure speculation :-). Hopefully someone at FARO will... Read more →

AutoCAD 2016: Extracting floorplans from point clouds using .NET

A little while ago you may remember an HTML progress meter I created while looking at “future API features”. The API feature in question was of course for AutoCAD 2016, and related to the extraction of floorplans programmatically using .NET, a topic we’re covering in today’s post. We’re going to see some fairly basic code that asks AutoCAD to analyse a point cloud – that we’re going to attach from an RCS or RCP file – and generate polyline boundaries for its floorplan. Now I didn’t actually have a great point cloud to test this, so I ended up... Read more →

Learning TypeScript

I’m making the most of a late flurry of snow in the alps, this week, finishing up the winter season on the slopes with my family. And I’m going from the snow to the sun next week, as I head across to Singapore for some internal planning meetings. I do expect to blog pretty much as usual, during the course of these two weeks, though (I’ve still got too much to talk about regarding AutoCAD 2016, for one thing). A topic that I wanted to share today is regarding a MOOC I’m currently following via edX. It started last... Read more →

Autodesk Cloud Accelerator v2 | Updated developer portal

Thanks for all the interactions, yesterday. April 1st is really one of my favourite days of the year: there’s lightheartedness and creative energy everywhere you look. But all good things come to an end – even if the years seem to tick by increasingly quickly – so it’s time for more serious matters. Today’s post shares a couple of updates related to Autodesk’s burgeoning PaaS layer… Firstly, the inaugural Autodesk Cloud Accelerator turned out to be wildly successful: both for the external people who attended – there were 12 proposals selected from a pool of 50, with developers focused... Read more →

Autodesk SoCap

I’m excited to announce the newest member of the Autodesk product portfolio, Autodesk SoCap. The term “SoCap” stands for “Software Capture”, in much the same way as ReCap stands for “Reality Capture”. SoCap is a tool that helps you capture existing software behaviour as code, just as ReCap helps you capture a 3D scene as a point cloud. For SoCap to do its thing, you point it at the piece of software whose behaviour you want to capture – whether desktop software on Windows/Linux/OS X, mobile software targeting iOS/Android* or the URL of a cloud-based app – and SoCap... Read more →