This milestone has crept up on me, over the last few months. I guess I’ve been putting off thinking – and blogging – about it.
Earlier this year we made the decision to wind down development and support of the time-series database that serves as the back-end for Project Dasher. (Fun fact: this project was originally codenamed Blitzen – the name of a reindeer that was part of the “back-end” for Dasher on Santa’s sleigh – and eventually became known internally as Data 360.)
Anyway, it was time to wind it down, both because of the widespread availability of alternative cloud-based time-series databases – whether from AWS, Azure, GE, MongoDB, etc. – but also the increasing maturity of the Autodesk Tandem facility monitoring feature and its underlying streams implementation. Basically APS developers have lots of options, these days (not that we ever made Data 360 available publicly – other than to drive the Dasher demo – but has been clear for some time that other systems are available for Autodesk Research to use, too).
One major impact of this retirement is that – as of next week, or probably not long thereafter – the public demo of Project Dasher will no longer have sensor data when you load it.
If you’re not sure what Dasher is, here are a few screenshots of past projects, over the years.
At some point I would like to get another version of Dasher working with a similar feature-set – probably based on Tandem rather than the APS Viewer – but that’s not something that will happen soon: there are too many other things taking precedence, for now.
I know there are people out there who use Dasher as a way to demonstrate the potential for APS to deliver digital twin experiences: I sincerely hope you get this news in time, and have the opportunity to shift across to using Tandem – or screenshots/recordings you’ve taken as backups – for this.
Thank you all for your support of this project, over the years: it’s been quite the journey, and I’m happy to see the future of building web-based digital twins with Autodesk’s platform is safely in the hands of the Tandem team. Please do pay attention to what they’re doing – it’s all very exciting.
