Through the Interface

The Force Awakens in AutoCAD

Some of you may remember this series of posts from the beginning of the year (I also mentioned it in the last post). It showed how you might use AutoCAD and .NET (in this case via F#) to animate the Star Wars opening crawl for the first 6 movies. Back then I said I’d update the video series to include Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, once it was released. Today is that day… due to some bizarre accident of international scheduling, I got to see it two days ago, here in Switzerland. I took a few snaps... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 4

Happy Friday! It’s time to unveil the completed Star Wars opening crawl inside AutoCAD… After an intro and seeing various pieces implemented, in today’s post we’re going to add the crawl text and animate its movement into the distance. The initial blue text The theme music The star field The disappearing Star Wars logo The crawling text As the surprise “bonus” item 6, I decided to add a planet and – at the end of the crawl – shift the view downwards to show its surface: an effect I’ve seen in the opening crawl for at least one of... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 3

Now that we’ve introduced the series and seen how to add some introductory text, theme music and a field of stars, it’s time for the Star Wars logo. The initial blue text The theme music The star field The disappearing Star Wars logo The crawling text The logo came, once again, from the HTML opening crawl, which embeds some SVG content representing it. I copied this into a standalone SVG text file, ran it through a web-service to translate it to DXF and then opened that inside AutoCAD. The outlines of the letters (or groups of letters) were continuous... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 2

After introducing this series in the last post, today we’re going to address the first 3 items on our TODO list: The initial blue text The theme music The star field The disappearing Star Wars logo The crawling text The following two items are fairly significant, in their own right, so they’ll each take a post of their own to complete. Oh, and I’ve thrown in a surprise item 6, which I’ll unveil when we implement the crawling text. Before we dive in, it’s important to make some points about the code: because this is mainly just a bit... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 1

Happy New Year, everyone! As mentioned in the last post, I took a couple of weeks off over the holiday period, extending Autodesk’s annual “week of rest” between Christmas and New Year to a full fortnight. This time of year clearly has religious significance for many. Some go to church, to temple or even to Stonehenge, some watch one or more of the Star Wars trilogies – arguably which they choose depends on how devout they are. I only ended up watching one Star Wars film, over the holiday period, and while it was from the Despecialized Edition, I... Read more →

Extracting code from blog posts using F# – Part 1

I mentioned some weeks ago that I was looking to automate the validation of a bunch of source files I have on disk before uploading them to GitHub. I decided to get started on that, this week, to see what was involved. As mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to programmatically query posts from Typepad, extract any embedded code from them and compare it with what I had on disk, to see which files were already correct and which needed to be created or removed. The first step was to choose a language. The fact this is really... 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 →

Money designed with AutoCAD

I'm currently in Boston for an internal technical summit where I'll be presenting sessions on Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion (which will the sessions I've submitted - and will hopefully get accepted - for AU 2013). I arrived a day early and rented a bicycle from the hotel, taking the opportunity to cycle through the MIT and Harvard campuses (both of which are in Cambridge, where the summit is taking place) and then on to downtown Boston. It was really great being back in Boston after probably five years - it's still one of my favourite cities in the... Read more →

Show me the money!

Or otherwise named “Creating an AutoCAD jig to dynamically display a guilloché pattern using F#”. But then why pass up the chance for a Jerry Maguire reference? :-) Anyway, to continue on from last week’s post, Doug – who had presented the original challenge – went on to suggest that I give it the same treatment as Spiro. Basically to implement a jig to display the guilloche pattern dynamically as you input the various options. I understand the difficulty in understanding the nature of the geometry being created in the previous version… the fact that I’d named the original... Read more →

Printing your own money with AutoCAD

Here’s a fun one to finish up the week. And no, it isn’t a belated April Fool’s gag. ;-) I should probably say right away that you won’t be printing money after reading this blog post, but you might know more about some of the security measures used by those who do. A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Doug Bell at PaperMoneyWorld.net: I have tried your Spiro for AutoCAD and I enjoy it very much. I would like to challenge you to another function I would like to see that is related to the spirograph.... Read more →

AU 2012 Handout: Moving code to the cloud – it’s easier than you think – Part 1

After posting the handout for my Wednesday class, now it’s time to start the one for Tuesday's - CP1914 - Moving Code to the Cloud: It's Easier Than You Think (I have a lot else going on on Tuesday, but this is the only class on that day for which I needed to prepare material). Attendance for both classes is looking fairly good: there are currently 138 attendees registered for the Cloud session and 62 registered for the one on WinRT. Why all this talk of the cloud? The software industry is steadily adopting a model commonly referred to... Read more →

Cloud & mobile series summary

As we reach the end of this long series of posts on moving code to the cloud – and a look at ways to use the functionality from a wide variety of applications, many of them on mobile devices – I felt it was worth putting together a quick summary post to reinforce the overall message (which may have been a bit lost in the sheer volume of information). Firstly, here are the posts in this series, including those looking at the original creation of the “desktop” application functionality: Creating the core desktop functionality Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating... Read more →

Using Windows Azure Caching with our ASP.NET Web API project

As mentioned in the last post, while working on deploying our web-site and its related services to Windows Azure, I started to chew on the economics of Azure hosting. This is especially relevant as I start to see my free 3-month subscription’s resources being burned through by all of you checking them the links in the last post. ;-) Here’s what I found… “extra small” instances are a mere sixth of the cost of “small” instances (not taking into account the 6-month pre-purchase discount on small instances, admittedly), which got me thinking: if I can reduce the resources needed... Read more →

Hosting our ASP.NET Web API project on Windows Azure – Part 1

Having built our local ASP.NET Web API project and consumed its data inside AutoCAD, we’re now ready to deploy our web-service to the cloud. In this first part, we’ll look at some background information on Azure, in particular, and then get ready for the publishing process, which we’ll complete in the next post in the series. Choosing a provider As is obvious from the title, for these posts we’re going to use Windows Azure. Alternatives such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) capabilities related to hosting ASP.NET – you basically get the ability to deploy Windows Servers... Read more →

Architecting for the Cloud

After introducing the (apparently somewhat charged, judging from the comments) topic of moving application functionality to the cloud, and then looking at the steps of creating and implementing an ASP.NET Web API project, we’re now going to take a brief step back before looking at how we can effectively make use of the data provided by these web-services inside AutoCAD. If you’re looking to assign blame (not that any is needed ;-), it’s Scott McFarlane’s fault we’re taking this brief backwards step: Scott raised the excellent point – which really needs addressing sooner rather than later in this series... Read more →

Exposing a RESTful web service for use inside AutoCAD using the ASP.NET Web API – Part 2

In the last post, we looked at the core technology we’re going to use to expose our web-service, along with the basic project set-up. In today’s post, we’re going to flesh out this project and see the web-service in action. At this point, I should point out that I've switched back across for VS2010 for the purposes of this post (and its immediate successors), as it really will simplify the eventual integration with Windows Azure. Before we dive into the implementation of our web-service, here are a few words on what we’re after… We want to implement two web-service... Read more →

Exposing a RESTful web service for use inside AutoCAD using the ASP.NET Web API – Part 1

As promised, here begins the technical portion of the series on moving application functionality to the cloud. As suggested, we’re going to take code from a couple of previous posts and put it in the cloud (although not immediately – first we’re going to move it to a local web-service, consume that in AutoCAD, and then look at our various cloud-hosting options). So why did I choose these two pieces of code, in particular? A couple of reasons: firstly, they both implement “behind-the-scenes” algorithms that are independent of AutoCAD – a typical piece of business logic that companies might... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian packing using F# – Part 3

As suggested in the last post, today we’re going to take the results of running the code from that post and use them to generate a hollowed-out sphere. A big thanks to Francesco Tonioni, from our Product Support team in Neuchatel, who spent some time throwing ideas around on a lazy (but very cold) Sunday afternoon, contributing significantly to this post. A few minor changes to the code were needed: rather than creating the spheres at exactly the size at which they were generated by the F# code, I adjusted the C# code to multiply the radius by 0.98... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian packing using F# – Part 2

This post continues the series on fill algorithms for 3D printing by looking specifically at an Apollonian sphere packing. In the last post we got most of the way there, but today we’re going to introduce a more elegant algorithm for solving the problem (with pretty impressive results :-). Many thanks to Professor Ronald Peikert from ETH Zurich for kindly providing the C++ code used to generate the F# code in today’s post. The original algorithm was outlined in this paper co-authored by Professor Peikert, under the section The “Inversion Algorithm” and – as you might divine from the... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian packing using F# – Part 1

So far in this series, we’ve looked at Apollonian circle packing using C# and also F#. The next few posts will look at solving this problem in 3D: performing Apollonian sphere packing. I’ve decided to stay in F# for the algorithmic side of things: it just feels a much cleaner environment for dealing with this kind of problem, and, besides, I’ve been having too much fun with it. :-) One thing I should mention, as this series is nominally about 3D printing fill algorithms: printing hollow spheres isn’t at all straightforward with today’s 3D printing technology, as support material... Read more →