IoT
-
One of the projects I've been working on – alongside Simon Breslav, a colleague from Autodesk Research Toronto – is a prototype, web-based client for our IoT back-end. I'll be demoing it next week at the Forge DevCon. It uses Forge's viewer component to provide access to sensor readings from within a 3D model. Here are a few sequences of images to give you an idea of what it does. It's still early days, but we're steadily working towards feature parity with the desktop-based Project Dasher. The first sequence shows how you can view the sensors in a building model:…
-
Following up from last week's post, which included a brief video showing where we're headed with generative design, today's post highlights a speech by my colleague in Autodesk's Office of the CTO (OCTO), Maurice Conti. I've mentioned Maurice before: he has an Applied Research team working on Pier 9 that is currently hiring a Machine Learning + Robotics researcher. Maurice gave a speech at TEDx Portland entitled "The Future of Human Augmentation". It looks at how we're being augmented, not only by computational systems (helping us think) but by robotic systems (helping us make) and by a digital nervous system…
-
We have our annual, internal Technical Summit coming up in a couple of weeks. I'll be heading across to Montreal with 700+ other Autodesk employees to learn more about the cool stuff going on within the company. As I've done in previous years, I'll do my best to report information that I think will be interesting to this blog's readers (and that is ready to be discussed publicly, of course). One of the event's activities is being hosted by my team: the IoT Hackday. We'll have 30+ participants spread across 8 different teams. Each team will get provided some sensors,…
-
Preparations are in full swing for the Forge DevCon being held in San Francisco on June 15-16, 2016. Fort Mason is going to be transformed into a Mecca for software developers serving the AEC and Manufacturing industries (or people simply wanting to know more about the Autodesk platform technology). As I've mentioned a few times, I'm in charge of the speaker track for Virtual and Augmented Reality. We have some great speakers lined up: Tony Parisi (one of the inventors of VRML, back in the day) will be talking about WebVR and glTF, Josh Carpenter will be talking about User…
-
After a nice week on the slopes – children in Neuchâtel have their annual "semaine blanche" around March 1st, the day the canton celebrates becoming a republic – I eased back into work this morning by heading across to Geneva for the 86th "Salon de l'Auto". I was there when the doors opened so I could make it home for a late lunch. As usual there was plenty of shiny on display at this year's show. I liked the fact that I could watch the reflection in the paintwork of a physical car of a video that was certainly computer-generated…
-
Registration is now open for the Forge Developer Conference being held at Fort Mason in San Francisco on June 15 & 16, 2016. This event marks a significant shift for Autodesk, as we march towards a future where the majority of software is delivered via the web – and is accessible via web-services. We're still very much at the beginning of this journey and this conference is a great opportunity to be part of it: you can get in on the ground floor and participate actively in this important industry shift. We're expecting upwards of 1,100 developers (from more than…
-
As part of the restructuring that went on at Autodesk, last week, I have a new role. This isn't a bad thing, thankfully: in fact it's the opposite… it's something I've been working towards for several years. I've been in the AutoCAD team for the last 4 years and was in the Autodesk Developer Network team for my 16+ years at Autodesk prior to that. These were great environments for me, for quite different reasons, but my ultimate interests lie in where the company (and the broader industry) is heading, technology-wise… one reason I've always felt drawn to the work…
-
After seeing how we can use Cylon.js to control Sphero's Ollie and BB-8 robots from a browser, and then using the same mechanism from inside a custom AutoCAD command, today we're going to drive these cute little bots based on AutoCAD geometry. The idea is that we'll decompose regular curves – whether lines, arcs, polylines or splines – and use the "segments" as movement instructions for our robots. The approach is simple enough: we'll iterate along the length of each selected curve and generate a set of instructions – really just a set of angles – for the associated bot.…
-
After looking at how to control robots using Cylon.js in the last post, in this post we're going to get that working inside AutoCAD. For now with just a command that allows us to move the robots – in a future post we'll analyse geometry and use that to specify the movements. The "controller" code we saw in the last post needed a little updating for use in this way. I went ahead and stripped out the keyboard-related code – as we're using behind a web-service – and added the capability to control individual robots. We want to be able…
-
Happy New Year! I hope that those of you who celebrate at this time of year, were able to take a nice, relaxing break. I certainly did. 🙂 Anyway, it's now time for me to ease back into work. But rather than it being an abrupt transition, I've decided to take a look at a pet project that I thought would be pretty fun: controlling robots from inside AutoCAD. The thinking is to outline some possibilities for moving virtual robots inside a floorplan drawing and having their real-world, physical counterparts move as instructed. Perhaps along a specific path, perhaps by…