William Le Couteur's Autocad Blog

Just a few renders...

2012-01-02T00:34:00.001-08:00

What you see here is the result of a bit of experimentation. With Autocad the trick is to make sure LIGHTINGUNITS is set to either 1 or 2 and that you have sky background and illumination selected. It also pays to open the Advanced Render settings and make sure Final Gather is ON. The foliage in the foreground was cut and pasted in afterwards in Photopaint.
No Sky needed in the night shot but it seems it stayed on anyway!

These are a friend's design, the first is a renovation of the front of an existing house and the second is a bachelor pad, to go in a large backyard. The first one has scorched weatherboards.
Apparently this protects the wood for about 80 years.

Sheetmetal developments and PIDs

2011-12-10T19:29:00.000-08:00

This might be handy for some: How to make a flat sheet metal pattern from a 3D solid in Autocad?

Well, as far as I know, it does not do it out of the box, unlike Inventor or Solidworks. I do not have these so I have to manage somehow.

Normal transitions can be done using 3rd party programs that do that sort of thing. Unfortunately, these do not handle special cases like the round outlet being on an angle, as well as being offset.

Back to basics: just draw the object in 3D and draw a series of lines in 3D to represent the folds that you want. If your metal thickness is 3mm, you would offset everything in 1.5mm ie half, in from the outside of the finished product.

Sounds easy? It is. Sadly it is extremely time consuming and tiresome. This is where some Lispy tricks come in handy, and while it does not do the full job, it does help.

First, to draw a transition, draw a rectangle, then a circle somewhat higher. You then use the loft command to produce the 3d solid. Now it pays to change to a different layer and draw the midlines, ie those ones halfway in as mentioned above. So, for instance you would draw a rectangle on top of the original one and offset it by 1.5mm if your metal thickness was 3mm.
same for the circle. You may need to hide the original solid to get the offset command to work.

If your circle was parallel to the rectangle, you could now issue the divide command and pick the circle and divide it into 48 pieces. You will see that nothing appears to have happened after the divide command. This is now the time to change your OSNAP to endpoint, intersection and node. This last one is important because it will pick up all the nodes (points) that were put in and that you cannot see as yet.

Issue the line command and hover over parts of your circle- you should see the nodes light up as the mouse passes over them.

Draw in your development lines-this takes a while. Now you find out the length of the small arc,ie the bit between two of the nodes. This can be done by copying the circle and the nodes off a little bit an putting in some lines to the nodes and then trimming off the circle, leaving an arc.

Right click on the arc and select Properties, it will give you an arc length. Write this down.
Call it Length A.

Next, start on the development, usually handy to the 3D part so you can see both at the same time. The rectangular part edge is the best place to start. You will see that there is a triangle, and the lengths of the sides are easily found through their properties, so after drawing one side, draw two circles the radii of which are these lengths. Now draw two lines from each end of the original line to where the two circles cross. Erase the circles and you are now started.

To get the part that has all the little creases, you need to do the same again, but for one of the sides of the triangle you use length A as mentioned above. All the while you are building on the original triangle. Normally, a transition gets welded up the middle so normally half has to be drawn (or a quarter if it is symmetrical).

My lisp routine (available free if anyone is interested) allows you to pick the 3d line, then it draws a circle with the radius information from that line, which does speed things up a tiny bit.

A nice finishing touch is to put 0.5mm radius circles on every intersection around the circle and then trim them out so they appear as notches. This is so the sheetmetal guy does not have to divide them out - he just folds using the notches.

Next a bit on PIDs (Process and Instrumentation Diagrams)

If you have done any of these, you know 3 things:

1. Lines are nice to draw first, and blocks are ok to put in a drawing, but these ones always land on lines, so the inner bits have to be trimmed out.

2. There are lisp routines around that do autobreaking of the lines, but this has to be organised or downloaded or paid for. If, like me, you only do PIDs about 10% of the time, you might not bother. (Maybe I should!)

3. Autodesk make an add-on to Autocad, specifically to do PIDs. Unfortunately at NZ$3500 to upgrade from standard Autocad, and an extra NZ$300 a year this is not liable to be on the menu any time soon.

So along came one of my ideas that even I have my doubts will catch on: what if you could do a drawing just by pressing keys on your keyboard? Turns out you cannot use the arrow keys, but the rest of the keyboard is available, using a lisp routine (see below). Just issue the command PID, pick your start point, press the "o" key (make sure caps lock is OFF!) and up the line goes by 6mm. Press "l" key and off to the right it goes by 6mm. Now press 4 on the keypad-and a manual valve is inserted. Press 5 and an actuated valve is put in. "k" is to go left and "," is used to go down.

The routine uses the autcad lisp function grread - short for graphics read, which also does the keyboard. In my research trying to understand this I realised that my level of writing lisp is very low level and basic....Anyway, it does work. You could cut and paste the following code into notepad and save it as PID.lsp.

Whoops! Stop press....just tried the routine below at work and found that HP keyboards seem to have a different mapping right is 76, left is 75, up is 79. Strangely, down is still 44. Go figure.

Stop press yet again. Just realised that if you have caps lock on, then the above is the way to go.
If caps lock off, then the stuff below is OK!

;THIS DRAWS A LINE WITH VALVES FOR A PID

;BY BILL LE COUTEUR 2011
(defun C:PID()
(setq initial_point (getpoint "Pick a start Point\n"))
(setq the_x (car initial_point))
(setq the_y (cadr initial_point))

(print the_x)
(print the_y)

(while (setq the_input (grread 1 5 2))
(progn

(if (eq (car the_input) 2)
(progn
(setq key_press (cadr the_input))
(print the_input)
(print key_press)
(print initial_point)
(print the_new_point)

(if (eq key_press 108) ;to the right
(progn
(setq the_x_right ( + the_x 6))
(command "_line" (list the_x the_y) (list the_x_right the_y) "")
(setq the_orient "right")
(print "x,xright,y")
(print the_x)
(print the_x_right)
(print the_y)
(setq the_x ( + the_x 6))
);end 108 progn
);end 108 if

(if (eq key_press 107) ;to the left
(progn
(setq the_x_left ( - the_x 6))
(command "_line" (list the_x the_y) (list the_x_left the_y) "")
(setq the_orient "left")
(setq the_x ( - the_x 6))
);end 107 progn
);end 107 if

(if (eq key_press 111) ;up
(progn
(setq the_y_up ( + the_y 6))
(command "_line" (list the_x the_y) (list the_x the_y_up) "")
(setq the_orient "up")
(print "y,y-up,x")
(print the_y)
(print the_y_up)
(print the_x)
(setq the_y ( + the_y 6))
);end 111 progn
);end 111 if

(if (eq key_press 44) ;down
(progn
(setq the_y_down ( - the_y 6))
(command "_line" (list the_x the_y) (list the_x the_y_down) "")
(setq the_orient "down")
(setq the_y ( - the_y 6))
);end 44 progn
);end 44 if

;--------------------INSERTING VALVE MANUAL-----------------------------

(if (and (eq key_press 52) (eq the_orient "right")) ;valve manual to the right
(progn
(command "-insert" "vmr" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( + the_x 6))
);end 52 progn
);end 52 if

(if (and (eq key_press 52) (eq the_orient "left")) ;valve manual to the left
(progn
(command "-insert" "vml" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( - the_x 6))
);end 52 progn
);end 52 if

(if (and (eq key_press 52) (eq the_orient "up")) ;valve manual to the up
(progn
(command "-insert" "vmr" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "90")
(setq the_Y ( + the_Y 6))
);end 52 progn
);end 52 if

(if (and (eq key_press 52) (eq the_orient "down")) ;valve manual to the down
(progn
(command "-insert" "vmr" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "-90")
(setq the_Y ( - the_Y 6))
);end 52 progn
);end 52 if

;--------------------END OF INSERTING VALVE MANUAL-----------------------------

;--------------------INSERTING NON-RETUN VALVE FORWARD -----------------------------

(if (and (eq key_press 49) (eq the_orient "right")) ;to the right
(progn
(command "-insert" "VNFR" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( + the_x 6))
);end 49 progn
);end 49 if

(if (and (eq key_press 49) (eq the_orient "left")) ;to the left
(progn
(command "-insert" "VNFL" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( - the_x 6))
);end 49 progn
);end 49 if

(if (and (eq key_press 49) (eq the_orient "up")) ; to the up
(progn
(command "-insert" "VNFR" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "90")
(setq the_Y ( + the_Y 6))
);end 49 progn
);end 49 if

(if (and (eq key_press 49) (eq the_orient "down")) ; to the down
(progn
(command "-insert" "VNFR" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "-90")
(setq the_Y ( - the_Y 6))
);end 49 progn
);end 49 if

;--------------------END OF INSERTING VALVE MANUAL-----------------------------

;--------------------INSERTING VALVE ACTUATED-----------------------------

(if (and (eq key_press 53) (eq the_orient "right")) ;valve to the right
(progn
(command "-insert" "var" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( + the_x 6))
);end 53 progn
);end 53 if

(if (and (eq key_press 53) (eq the_orient "left")) ;valve to the left
(progn
(command "-insert" "val" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( - the_x 6))
);end 53 progn
);end 53 if

(if (and (eq key_press 53) (eq the_orient "up")) ;valve to the up
(progn
(command "-insert" "var" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "90")
(setq the_Y ( + the_Y 6))
);end 53 progn
);end 53 if

(if (and (eq key_press 53) (eq the_orient "down")) ;valve to the down
(progn
(command "-insert" "var" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "-90")
(setq the_Y ( - the_Y 6))
);end 53 progn
);end 53 if

;--------------------END OF INSERTING VALVE ACTUATED-----------------------------

;--------------------INSERTING VALVE CONTROL-----------------------------

(if (and (eq key_press 54) (eq the_orient "right")) ;valve to the right
(progn
(command "-insert" "vcr" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( + the_x 6))
);end 54 progn
);end 54 if

(if (and (eq key_press 54) (eq the_orient "left")) ;valve to the left
(progn
(command "-insert" "vcl" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "0")
(setq the_x ( - the_x 6))
);end 54 progn
);end 54 if

(if (and (eq key_press 54) (eq the_orient "up")) ;valve to the up
(progn
(command "-insert" "vcr" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "90")
(setq the_Y ( + the_Y 6))
);end 54 progn
);end 54 if

(if (and (eq key_press 54) (eq the_orient "down")) ;valve to the down
(progn
(command "-insert" "vcr" (list the_x the_y) "1" "1" "-90")
(setq the_Y ( - the_Y 6))
);end 54 progn
);end 54 if

;--------------------END OF INSERTING VALVE CONTROL-----------------------------

);end if progn
);end if

);end progn

);end while

);end func

Revit Spark

2011-10-08T19:24:00.001-07:00

A while back I found that you could download a copy of a thing called SPARK.
This is a possible release of a different type of Revit.

The download is from: http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/spark/

You can check Robin Capper's blog opinion at http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/,
look for 13th September 2011.

It is free to download and will last till 7th July 2012.

I would call it Revit LT, ie "Low Technology"? or LITE?
(As Tim would say, you are able to draft lots on LT because it is "Lite")

Someone has suggested I write up my experiences with it.
I have had experience with Autocad Architecture, so thought it might be
interesting to give it a try.

At the outset, I have to say that leaping straight in is not the ideal
way to approach learning a new program. I found lot's of frustrations that
would not have happened if I had learned in a classroom situation.
I have given Revit a go before about a year ago, so the user interface was
familiar and I had a small project a friend had started using 2D Autocad.

The project is to take a standard house and put a basement rumpus room
in it. The drawings are not perfect(!?...are they ever?) and are in a very
preliminary stage.

The things I found most wanting were: (unless I'm missing something!)

1. No ability to be in 3D of the level you are editing. Sure, you can
make a 3D view and fiddle around for ages with that, but that is a
separate view. This compares very badly with Autocad Architecture, which
allows you to do an instant 3D view of the level you are editing,
and whats more, get a perspective view in an instant.

2. The supply of windows and doors seemed a little poor. I guess I could
create my own families, but that feels like a bit of a mission. For instance,
I wanted bifolds, 4 off, on the front part. Not there.... So mangled a curtain
wall to fill it in.

As with Autocad, it is a lot of knowing where to find things....

Just a Simple Door

2011-09-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has a joinery shop. It seems sometimes he gets a job where an architectural style of door is needed. He mentioned how it was a bit of calculator bashing to work out the plank widths and how many planks etc. Previously, I had investigated doing Autocad scripts generated from an excel visual basic macro, so I thought, what good waste of my time this might be!

It was quite surprising to me that it was quite tricky to work out, and compromises had to be made-for instance the gap had to be specified, not calculated, then all the tricky stuff with decimal points and integers etc.

The resulting script draws it in 3D.

Autocad and piping

2011-08-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Just had a look on Youtube at a demo of Autodesk's Plant 3D which I guess is an add-on to Autocad. It looks easy to use and produces things like isometric drawings with bills of materials.
From the short demo, I came away quite impressed. You can see one of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokkAr0Lc2I

It makes my home grown approach to piping look a little crude and backward. If you want a look at how I do this, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZsVUjbRWO4

Having said this, I could imagine how hard it would be to persuade decision makers at my work that this would be a good way to go, probably because my work about 20% piping. Well, I can dream can't I?

Even if I were certain that this was the way to go, there would be a nagging doubt that maybe other products such as Revit MEP might be the clever way.....

So, back to Youtube and what do you know? Here is a demo of Revit MEP,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sf_b_Wes2s

To me, it looked like a lot of button pressing for not much result. So here is a puzzle: Autodesk make and sell both products.....why?

I don't want to be seen as a Revit basher here, because as I understand it, a lot of quite clued up people think that Revit is the way to go for drawings of buildings, so maybe I'm missing something.

Acad.pat

2011-04-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

A co-worker who uses Autocad LT to do his electrical drawings recently said he could not open one of my drawings, because I had saved it as R2010. I had recently been upgraded from Autocad R2008 to R2010, so I said:

"I believe you may be able to upgrade to the R2010 version".

Which he did, which in hindsight was not the best plan, as after installing he wanted to use the hatch command, and got a dialog saying:

"Cannot find acadlt.pat"

Which is fine: All you have to do is go Options, File Locations, and add where it is to your support path. Unfortunately, on the network, we are mere users and are not allowed access to our c: drive.

The IT man was duly called, and progress is on going...involving reimaging and so on.

Which made me think, why can you not get a copy off the internet, download it, stick it somewhere where you are allowed to go and add that location to your support listing?

Strangely enough, I was not able to find a copy of acad.pat anywhere!

Of course there were heaps of people giving out add-ons to the file, but not the file itself.

So here I am, Saturday morning of the 23rd of April, rummaging around my hard drive for the mysterious file. (Mad? Yes!). You can open it up in Notepad and check it out.

Here is part of it:

;;
;; Copyright (C) 1991-2011 by Autodesk, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
;; Version 2.0
;; AutoCAD Hatch Patterns
;;
;;
;; Note: in order to ease migration of this file when upgrading
;; to a future version of AutoCAD, it is recommended that you add
;; your customizations to the User Defined Hatch Patterns section at the
;; end of this file.
;;

;; Note: Dummy pattern description used for 'Solid fill'.
*SOLID, Solid fill
45, 0,0, 0,.125
*ANGLE, Angle steel
0, 0,0, 0,.275, .2,-.075
90, 0,0, 0,.275, .2,-.075
*ANSI31, ANSI Iron, Brick, Stone masonry
45, 0,0, 0,.125

It does go on for quite a bit more, as I have Autocad Architecture, then towards then end it has this bit:

;; User Defined Hatch Patterns
;; Add any hatch patterns that you define to this section of
;; the file to ensure that they migrate properly when
;; upgrading to a future AutoCAD version. If duplicate hatch
;; patterns are found in this file, items in the User Defined
;; Hatch Patterns section take precedence over patterns that
;; appear earlier in the file.
;;

I find it puzzling as to why the file is called acadlt.pat for LT, but maybe they are given less hatches out of the box.

STOP PRESS! According to Robin, a good plan is to run Autocad first time WITH ADMINISTRATOR RIGHTS! Should I tell the IT man?......

Autocad 2012 - 3dconfig

2011-04-02T01:13:00.000-07:00

Well, here we go again, with another release of Autocad.

A quick verdict:

1. It seems nice to use, quick and responsive.

2. No new killer features, except that the section command seems to be doing what it should have done in R2007. Namely the colour of the cut lines seems to be OK now.
To me that is almost worth the upgrade.

3. The nicest thing I like is the display. I have an old quadro fx1500 video card and after updating the video driver, I used 3dconfig to enable hardware acceleration. At first I had rotten results, but after setting it to only have Gooch hardware shader, I found it performed a lot better.
The point is here that you need to update your video driver with a new version, and set it's usage to be not too overtaxing.

4. It has a lot of other stuff that I probably would not use, but I have to concede that my usage is not everyones! Things like 3d parametric arrays and so on.

5. Rendering seems a lot better.

6. As usual, a small upgrade, but all these small things add up over the years to make things a little easier. For instance hatching.

7. A little easy to miss is a new system for views-there is a new bit of text in the top left corner to select views, and visual styles. This comes under the heading of old dogs and new tricks.....woof.

It seems there is more and more stuff with each release. It shows up in the file size of the download (I don't bother with discs any more). It was a 1.4GB download.
Back in 2002, it seemed to fit on a cd.

I had a bit of fun installing: It seemed Nortons noticed a good time to do a background scan, which froze things up a bit. Never mind, do a "restore point". That failed as well, and I was just considering dealing to the whole hard drive, when I tried again and it seemed OK. This time, I hovered around and pounced on Nortons as soon as it came up and killed it off.

The picture of the house I did in Autocad Architecture 2011 as a concept for a friend, which shows what gooch shading looks like.

If you want a quick roundup of all the features, nicely presented, go see:
http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/acadblog/autocad-2012-new-features/

Last Post for a While

2011-01-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

A New Year's Resolution...haul back on the blogging and do something more useful.

Probably something to do with not a lot of feedback.

This post is about a porch roof I designed. My wife requested a cover over our front door so you don't have to get wet when it rains...it rains lots in Auckland. My original idea was a repeat of the roof nearby,ie tiles, rafters etc.

Then I saw one a friend had done: Just a sheet of glass held up by steel brackets.

Just to be competitive I designed a similar one, but this one used stainless steel. Originally, I chose 40 x 5 flat bars as the material, but the look was not all that "architectural", so I redesigned it to use a profile cut shape as the support part.

Why getting into Architectural Drafting might not be a good idea....

2010-12-29T14:55:00.000-08:00

You may not agree with this, but give Autodesk's new Homestyler a try out.

I have tried out previous attempts by Autodesk to do this sort of thing, but this is way out in front as far as usability and so on.

It's primary function seems to be for interior layouts and it is is very good at these. Outdoor layouts are catered for as well, but it appears a pretty flat world out there.

I could see my friends computer-phobic wife getting onto this and producing a kitchen or two.

In the pic, I just slammed in some furniture and hit the render button, and it produced a fairly good render.

There are some things it does not seem to do:

1. Allow you to make your own content.

2. The window content is a little sparse as yet, but might grow.

What this shows is the shape of things to come: The tools of designers will become so effortless to use, that anyone can produce drawings. The new job of architect might then become what it should be: a dreamer, artist etc.

I'm still waiting for something similar to come along for mechanical drafting.....

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=14943677

Yet another Golden Rule broken....again

2010-12-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

What Golden Rule? The one that says:

"If you draw everything, then there is less surprises in store for you!"

Recently, I had to draw a simple platform next to a dust extractor. The purpose of the platform was to enable maintenance persons to get access to Stuvex bottles. These bottles are an anti-explosion device and as far as I know, sense and explosion and release some sort of dampening gas so the explosion is nullified.

Just to make life complicated, it was located up alongside an old wall, which had pipes, electrical trunking and so on either side of a corrugated iron wall. I have found out the hard way, that it is easy for a draftsman to say- "This pipe will be in the way....it will have to be moved." "Yeah, but, where to?!" Easier drawn than done it appears.

The platform ended up being on 2 levels, and the lower one looked fine in the plan view: Yes, fine until you asked yourself: How to get it in that place? Fortunately, the man on the job is highly intelligent and made it bolted so it would fit in. Except there was a brace, not drawn, apparently in the way. Not a big deal, it can be relocated, but to have noted this on the drawing would have saved drafting embarrasment.

Which highlights a problem found often in drafting: You need to bash together a concept drawing, and then go through numerous changes to the design before it solidifies. By the time that happens, you are quite convinced that your drawing is accurate and wonderful.

At this point the thing to do is kick your own butt out onto the site and site check your critical dimensions. I do this now by forcing myself to put these dimensions on the drawings and putting heavy boxes around critical dimensions.

I guess the lesson I'm slowly learning here is that the initial site measuring should be thorough and accurate and not to trust old drawings, even ones that were done by yourself.

Finally, a quote sent to me that seems on the nail:

"We moderns have managed to combine an incredible mastery of technical knowledge and information with an astonishing ignorance of the traditional wisdom once possessed by an illiterate village elder, and evident for all to see on every page of history.

Spend more than you earn and you’ll go broke.

Give someone something for nothing, and he’ll soon expect something for nothing on a regular basis.

Fail to hold people accountable for their bad behavior, and they’ll continue to act badly.

Give people an excuse to fail, and they’re more likely to fail.

Let aggression go unpunished, and you’ll get more aggression."

-Bruce S. Thornton

The guy who sent me this one made the following suggestion:

(except substitute 'we moderns' with 'dimwitted lefties')

He hates Autocad....not really...Part 2 of Excel to Autocad

2010-11-27T18:02:00.000-08:00

I showed my PLC Excel application (see my previous post) at work , and the man said, yes, it had promise. As usual, someone else said "The address numbers are not right!" Ok.

So here I have wasted another sunny day (actually, if I go into the sun here in NZ for more than 15 minutes, I get burnt) fiddling with this stuff.

I have done a few changes, mainly the buttons that were embedded in the spreadsheet have now been transferred to a User Form, this is activated by the Quick Access menu. It just allows the user to scroll up and down and get the buttons to show only when necessary.

The range of equipment is now light, relay and solenoid valve. The silly idea of having each line drawn has been ditched in favour of block that just gets inserted.

The existing drawings like to tell the viewer that this is an "alarm light". Which seems extra work when you have a symbol that conveys that information. Same for the solenoid valve.

I did toy briefly with the idea of downloading the IEC 6017 electrical symbols. Yes, you can, but they cost. I had some doubts as to the snapping I should be using, but I figure if this all goes ahead and someone says they want 2mm snaps instead of 1.5mm, then it would not be that horrible to change.

He hates Autocad down by the sea shore...

2010-11-20T23:11:00.000-08:00

Hate is probably too strong a word. Prefers to avoid might be better. He is an electrical person who organises motors to start, stop and so on. He will never read this, but just in case I will refer to him as "Fred" (not his real name).

This is done by means of PLC's (Programmable Logic Controllers). My knowledge of these is limited to the following:
They have cabinets, and in these cabinets are "racks" and in the racks are "cards".

The cards are where the wires from say a relay are connected to. It appears Fred is quite OK with Excel and happily puts all his stuff into a spreadsheet. If the electricians were happy with this, instead of a drawing, then life would be easy.

But no. They like drawings, done in Autocad because that has been the way of things for quite a while. Recently, he gave me some drawings to update, which involve me typing hundreds of times the same thing over and over again. Words like REMOTE and FAULT. I have now requested we get a program called "Active Words" which just stores up your keystrokes and you can allocate hot keys to them.

This all triggered an idea (no doubt not new!) to see if I could give Autocad an Excel connection.
The plan was to have a spreadsheet all set up with buttons on it to make filling it out a quick thing, then a button to generate an Autocad script file. I did this once years ago, and have no idea where all the files ended up, so thought it might be fun to do a new approach. It is summer here now in Auckland and maybe fun might be getting out to the beach.

Another wasted weekend later, I have a bare bones setup that works. It was a struggle with Microsoft Excel 2007, as I was used to the 1997 version. Little differences like: you have to have a macro enabled file type, the ribbon where things seem to be never where you think they might be. Plus, if you want VBA, you have to add the "Developer" tab to the ribbon.

Here is a screen shot of the spreadsheet:

This is a snippet of the VBA screen, showing part of the code:

This one is a shot of a typical autocad drawing of a PLC card:

This one here shows a line of script generated lines and text:

They have only got LT Autocad, so a script is the only way here. I have been down this rocky road before in a way: I tried to do the same thing, but using their existing blocks, which became a nightmare.

This time: no blocks, just lines and text, it is just simpler. Having said that, the line shown was hard coded-ie the coordinates of everything had to be specified. If this goes any further, there would have to be a lot of number adding and string converting.

That's if....

Menu Pulldowns

2010-11-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have often wondered why Autocad does not ship with useful stuff as shown above. Even if it was supplied as a .mnu file, then it would be a 5 minute task to have it up and running should user want it, without cluttering up a standard installation.

The obvious answer is that Autodesk has to look after all it's 3rd party add-on sellers. Just a commercial reality I suppose.

The Flanges just come in as a block. The Fixings1 items come in as individual bits. Fixings2 - they come in as "combos" ie a set of head, flat washer, spring washer, and nut.

To make one of these for yourself is not that hard.

Just fire up Notepad (Look under Start/Programs/Accessories)

and type in something like this:

***MENUGROUP=BILRO1

***POP13
[Fixings1]

[M6 Bolt Head] -insert;"C:/cad/library/3D/fixings/bolter/m6headb";\1;1;0;

Then save it as not a text file, but with a ".mnu" on the end so the file name ends up something like Bilro1.mnu.

The syntax looks a bit arcane, but just go with the flow.... You can see where the path is, and the block name (ie just another dwg file) is, and all the ;\1;1;0; is a shorthand way of saying:

enter,pause,use a scale factor of 1 for X,enter, scale factor of 1 for Y,enter,use a rotation of zero,enter.

To sum up:

; means enter

\means pause for user input

Then you have the fun of getting it into Autocad, so just:

1. Right click on any toolbar, and choose customise.

2. See the little round button with the arrow down the bottom? Hit it.

(There is someone in Autodesk that loves to hide things....)

3. Now pick the Transfer tab up the top.

4. Hit the 2nd button from the right, one that should give a tooltip of "open customisation file".

5.When the dialog comes up look down the bottom-it will say something like "...cuix" or "cui", so change this to legacy files-mnu, and hunt for your file.

Although Autocad does not tell you this, I believe (I can always be wrong!) that it converts it to a cui or cuix file as you open it.

6. On the right panel, expand the + next to "Menus". You should see your new headings there.

7. On the left panel, do the same. You should see the standard menu headings there.

8. Go back to the right panel, pick your first item, hold down shift to select all your items, then drag and drop to the left panel in the position you would like them to occupy.

9. Hit OK.

After some humming and whirring, you should have your menu additions!

As you can see, the Fixings and Flanges are most likely foreign to you as here in NZ we use British Standard Flanges usually.

Now comes the part I had a lot of hassle with: What happens if you get the path name wrong, and need to update it? You would think it should be straight forward, but I did not find it that logical.

How to do it:

Do the same actions as above, but stop at item 7. On the left panel, right click on the items you have added previously and choose "delete". Yes, you are sure! Then from the right panel drag your headings back onto the left panel as before.

I am going to add a few more bits and pieces, and then I hope to post the whole lot as a bundle on http://bilrocad.com/

Video Postings

2010-10-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

I have been sort of busy doing some videos of my window frame drawing lisp set.

The above is an experiment to see if video embedding works.

The other videos can be found on youtube, just type bilrocad into the search box.

We had a long weekend here in Auckland, and I have been trying to find out how to stop huffing sounds when doing a video. (Maybe I should get a life? ...or paint the fence???)

For probably equally strange reasons I started doing a test of my Autocad skills on Brainbench, but made a bit of a hash of it and got a case of the "can't be bothereds" half way through. If you are tempted to do the test, make sure you have Autocad up and running before you start!

Sort of Autocad, and who is Nate Holt anyway?

2010-10-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I end up doing electrical drawings, which is quite irritating, because I'm not sure what I'm doing. I did actually get a New Zealand Certificate, Electrical in 1988, which I never ever used. I did go for the odd job, only to be told (no doubt quite rightly!), how long were you a tradesman electrician? On hearing the answer, I was told to sling my hook.

So I know what a relay is etc, but how everything hangs together and why is a bit of a mystery to me.

Recently, I tried to look for a lisp that would allow me to align some text, and in the process of looking ended up at a blog page of a man called Nate Holt. My first reaction was: "Wow! This guy can really do a good job explaining things!" Check out his blog yourself at:

http://nateholt.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/add-sounds-to-your-too-quiet-autolisp-utility/

On digging a little deeper, it turns out he is someow connected to Autocad Electrical, that is a "vertical" of Autocad, meaning it tacks on or adds to standard Autocad. Which led me to:

http://download.autodesk.com/us/autocadelectrical/adm717_build_2006-07-21a/index.html

I had a look at some the videos, and have come away quite convinced that this would be the way to go if you had to do Autocad Electrical drawings.

Last week, one of my co-workers popped his head up and asked:

"Hey, how come I have updated the file on my desktop and the other one has also updated?"

I cannot claim the high ground here, because it was about 5 years ago that I discovered that Windows Explorer loves to duplicate the display of it's folders, only to be told "Everyone knows that!" Which apparently is not true, because this man did not know either.

Whoever made Windows Explorer decided to make it "easier to use" and in the process removed it's logicality. By the way, in case you did not know, you can access Windows Explorer by right clicking the Start button.

Here is the top level of the "Desktop" shown in Windows Vista, notice the folder called Pictures:

Double click on Pictures and you get a view of the folders in there:

Then, close everything up and you get:

Next, double click on Computer and then open up Users:

Now double click on Pictures....there are the same damn folders!

Which reminds me of the Microsoft Helicopter Joke:

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an
electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic
navigation and communication equipment. Due to the clouds and haze
the pilot could not determine his position or course to steer to the
airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew
a handwritten sign and held it in the helicopter's window. The sign
said "WHERE AM I ?" in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a
large sign and held it in a building window. Their sign said, "YOU
ARE IN A HELICOPTER." The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map and
determine the course to steer to SEATAC (Seattle/Tacoma) airport and
landed safely.

After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the
"YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position. The
pilot responded, "I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building
because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless
answer."

Blocks versus lines and things

2010-09-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

I have been playing around with some joinery details, and it came to me that whoever drew them was thinking as he drew, with lines and so on. Once he had those lines, he saw no reason to alter them. Which is fine.

Only problem is, that he wanted to generate more sections based on them, things got a little messy, to the point where he must have said to himself:

"Funny? That dimension should have been 139mm....it is not actually that, on this model....oh well, let's just do a quickie here and alter the dimension text to read what I want instead of what it actually is".

Where's my big hammer?

The trouble is, when you are designing, it is wonderful to use lines etc, but once you have zeroed in on a particular size, make it into a block, so you don't inadvertently stretch it, plus you can reuse it, confident in knowing that it is a set piece of geometry.

I'm thinking here of a sectional view of a window sash.

Video Productions and old 2D lisps

2010-09-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

Once, long ago, last century I posted a heap of supposedly useful lisp routines on an old web site (now long gone). I have gone through these and reposted them on:

http://bilrocad.com/Lisps2d.html

I have also posted some ancient 3D ones on:

http://bilrocad.com/Lisps3d.html

It struck me that some of these are hard to use(!), so I have done a few videos, creating a special page for them at:

http://bilrocad.com/Videos.html

It was a bit of a learning curve doing them - they ended up with huge file sizes, so I downloaded a free converter and condensed them a bit.

Before 2000, I was interested in Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and sort of expected that this would evolve into something useful around about now. It appears not....although maybe I have not looked hard enough. I looked at all the old sites and most of them seem to be stuck around 7 years ago. Octaga seems to be the only one still chugging.

Revisions...the last post...I promise! and Working with XREFS

2010-09-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

Revision File Naming

About a year back I raved on about revision problems created by the fact that a drawing file might contain many layout tabs, where sheet 1 might be rev B and sheet 2 might be rev D.

My approach for the last year, which I now admit is one that has a major fault, was to remame the actual drawing file name so it reflected the fact that it was a later revision. For example 150283D.dwg. The "D" would represent the most advanced revision. Into a folder marked "History" went the old files, for record purposes.

This worked well until the man in charge of maintenance requested that we go back to the old format of 150283.dwg, because he had that number listed in his database package called Mainpac.

My new system, from here on, is to saveas the drawing into the History Folder as "150238 as at 12Aug2010", and keep the current one always as "150238.dwg". Always a brain strain to remember to saveas!

As well, the principle of Xreffing goes astray if you start changing file names. Xreffing is something I had avoided because people in the future would come unstuck if the masters of IT ever changed a name of a drive. (They would never do that....would they?)

If they replace me in the future, then part of that person's job is to understand the concept of xrefs and how to fix them if the drive is reanamed. With this in mind, I have started to use them sparingly.

A Different Way of working, using xrefs

We have a 3D models of the plant in a folder marked "Plant-3D Models". Each major building has a name, eg "Melthouse" and the file name is the same as the building name.

My idea is to gradually build these up so that they represent a true and more or less accurate model of what is currently there. In these models, there are section tools, which write out 2D sectional views to the appropriate folder.

Our setup is further complicated because we have 2 sets of drawings-One for proposals and one for things actually built. So if something went from a proposal to reality, I would have to change my xref paths. A further gotcha is my 3 step method:

Model with section tool.
Outputted section file.
Presentation drawing with outputted section file xreffed in.

The benefit of this seemingly overly complex method is that the process of updating the Presentation file is quick and easy: Change the model, write out the section file, reopen the Presentation file and everything is updated more or less automatically.

I have mentioned this in previous posts, but not in the same format!

At the moment this system seems to work, but sometimes the model gets cumbersome. For instance I might be working on the basement area, and you tend to trip over all the other stuff just looking at that. I'm thinking of a lisp routine that freezes layers according to their names- for instance Level1-Plant might get hidden when I want only level2 stuff showing. Yes, this can be done with layer filters and the layer manager. The trouble with the layer manager is that it seems to choose to turn off layers and not freeze them. As well, if you create new layers, you have to update the layer definition in the layer manager.

There are other problems: The detail required of a large plant layout is usually better to be of a low level, whereas for say a tank, I usually make this quite detailed. How to mix and match the two? I don't have an answer as yet. Possibly the answer lies in a 64Bit machine with 12Gigs...?

Handrails and Stairs....Lisps

2010-09-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

Turns out only 2 people requested the handrail routine I offered for free about a year ago.

If you wonder what these may be about, check out Utube, with bilroCAD in the search box.

Kind of makes me wonder what planet I was on when I thought maybe I could make a small amount of money doing this sort of thing.

Maybe the problem is that if you look hard enough, you can get all sorts of stuff for free.

So I have decided to not be so precious about them and have stuck them on my web site at
http://bilroCAD.com/Lisps3d.html

If you delve into them you might find (if you are a purist) that some of the programming looks a bit ham fisted. However, they do work most of the time! What do you expect for free? Just to add to the fun, looks a bit shonky when you see that I have put "these do not conform to any known standard"!

I have just spent about 2 days trying to get the handrail one to work with R2011. After much harrumphing I created a special one, just for R2011.

I'm pretty pleased with the handrail one, but the stair one could do with all sorts of things added:like footplates, top-plates, handrails and a sytem for variable depth treads, and some way of tying it in with the New Zealand Building Code. It produces stairs which have a rise x going of 46500, which is not how the NZBC does it, so this lot is going to have to be revisited big time soon!

I like to have just one version of Autocad, so it is quite annoying to have things that work on one version but not another.

Instructions....YAWN.....how exciting...

2010-08-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

I'm glad I did not just stick the handrial routine for free download. It seems a few instructions are needed. I like to think I'm OK at instructions, but there is a 20% of me that says "Room for improvement!"

I have sent the routine to a man, where he lives I don't know, but he has had an uphill battle to get the thing to work. Part of the problem is the method Autodesk used when it first designed lisp routines with dialog boxes. They made it so the main program was in one file, say HRAIL.LSP, and the dialog box was another file, say HRAIL.DCL. The usual problem is that Autocad cannot find where the dcl file is located. They probably had good reasons for their decision, but it has made it tricky for all from then on.

Here is the offending code from the lisp file:

(setq dcl_id (load_dialog "C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2002\Lisp file\Holes/HRAIL.dcl"))
(if (not (new_dialog "hrail" dcl_id))
(exit)
)

Autocad does not like it’s slashes “\” as in the old msdos days. You have to do it their funny way, ie “/”

So the corrected bit will be:

(setq dcl_id (load_dialog "C:/Program Files/AutoCAD 2002/Lisp file/Holes/HRAIL.dcl"))
(if (not (new_dialog "hrail" dcl_id))
(exit)
)

I'm hoping this fixes the problem.

Them there pesky round viewports

2010-08-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

A little known snafu with circular viewports is that it is hard to access their properties.

For instance you might want it to plot with conceptual shading.

It can be done as follows:

Right click on the viewport and choose properties. You will see 2 items (one is the circle) are selected because the little drop down at the top says "All(2)" , next, click the little triangle to show the drop down. Pick viewport.

Now you can see the properties, so choose conceptual for the plotting of the viewport.

Other CAD programs

2010-08-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

The above is a screen shot of DoubleCAD-XT.

Way back in 1986, I took a job that promised that CAD was on their radar and had every intention of introducing it. By 1988, they had bought a "CAD" system. It's specs and prices seem laughable today, but in those days it was a fairly average setup.

The computer was a 80386 with about 1 meg of ram, a 19" monitor running about 320 x 200 pixels if I remember rightly. (This was 22 years ago!). The program was an English one called "Supervisions". It proved an easy one to learn, and had a very clever 2 word command system.

For instance you had to pick "Add" then "Line". You could do all sorts of tricks: for instance "select all circles 200mm in diameter" was a piece of cake.

I remember that the whole lot cost about $45,000. This was for computer, software, an A1 pen plotter, and an A4 laser printer. The laser printer was super duper new technology then and was about $5000 worth. I can buy one today for $130.....

At some stage, I had a holiday. When the big boss found out I was the only person in New Zealand that could get a print out of this setup, he arranged for Autocad to be bought.

In true NZ management style, my immediate boss said:"We've got Autocad...training....your problem."

Fortunately for me, I had dabbled previously on an old AT that had no mouse, finding out how Autocad worked. I was not impressed with Autocad. It felt like a giant step backwards. Anyway, I went in, and over a weekend got to a stage where I could sort of draw.

Learning Autocad was a fairly steep hill for the next few months, and I gradually became comfortable with it's funny ways. That is, until I ended up in a consulting engineering place where the engineer said:"Paperspace...I want it done with paperspace!" Very stressful, especially as the permanent staff were not that helpful!

We have yet another new engineer that started recently. He obviously likes drawing because he is one of those ones that seem to like getting out graph paper and bits of plastic with holes in and doing a bit of old fashioned sketching. I've noticed that engineers that do this are usually quite good at their job. At which point I suggested he might like to use a CAD program seeing as he has a computer. What to use and how much might it cost though?

I had heard of Autodesk Freestyle, which is about $US49, so I did downloaded the trial copy.

It seems very much slanted to drawing things architectural, and did not feel very Autocaddish.

Cruising google, I found another one called DoubleCAD-XT. This is very similar to Autodesk's LT. This one is free, and I found it appears to do the 2D job OK, although I did not try to do a proper drawing from start to finish. If you are used to Autocad, this one might be a little irritating, as some commands are similar and others not. His battle now will be to convince the IT department that this is a good idea......

Photofly and Accessing Blocks

2010-08-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

I have given photofly a bit of a try, and a series of pics of a boilerhouse produced something, but I'm not all that pleased with my results. I have to put my hand up here to say it is most likely the way I took the photos.

I questioned some drafting friends and they said accessing blocks was not a problem for them. Apparently I'm an old fuddy duddy because I use the scroll bar in Windows Explorer. The thing to do is to get onto the directory, then hit say "f" for "fixings" to get to the fixings directory.

The result of this must be: "Can you teach an old dog new tricks?"

Woof.

Ouch!.....Again!

2010-08-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

I'm not having a good run lately. Things seem to be going wrong on a daily basis at the moment after a dream run of 2 years with no problems.

The latest drama is a lisp routine, which while seeming to do the job, was not really.

The routine in question is a round flange drawing one. The problem was that while I keyed in a pitch circle diameter of 295mm, it took it upon itself to draw one at 297.82mm or so....Nasty, because the flange looked ok.

The lesson learned? Make sure any routine that draws anything sets the osmode (ie the running snap value) to ZERO. ie to achieve this , use the following code:

(setvar "osmode" oldsnapmode);this is so that you can reset at the end
(setvar "osmode" 0)

Here is the routine, if you like such things, cut and paste into notepad,
call it flan3d.lsp and load it by dragging it from explorer into your autocad drawing.

To run, type flan3d at the prompt.

;Program written by Bill Le Couteur
;Auckland NZ
;Rev 0 date 16/6/00
;This program draws a flange in 3d

(defun c:flan3d()
(setvar "CMDECHO" 0)
(setq oldsnapmode (getvar "osmode"))
(setvar "osmode" 0)
(setq flangeod(getreal "\nEnter the outside diameter: "))
(setq flthick(getreal "\nEnter the Thickness: "))
(setq flangeid(getreal "\nEnter the Internal Diameter : "))
(setq boltholedia(getreal "\nEnter the Bolt Hole Diameter: "))
(setq boltpcd(getreal "\nEnter the PCD: "))
(setq no_holes (getint "\Enter the number of holes: "))
(setq boltpcr (/ boltpcd 2))
(setq the_point (getpoint "\nPick the point to draw it: "))
(command "cylinder" the_point "d" flangeod flthick)
(command "cylinder" the_point "d" flangeid flthick)
(command "cylinder" the_point "d" boltholedia flthick)
(command "move" "l" "" "0,0" (list boltpcr 0))
(command "array" "l" "" "p" the_point no_holes "" "" )
(setvar "osmode" oldsnapmode)
(setvar "CMDECHO" 1)
(princ)
)

The end to grumpiness and Photofly

2010-07-27T12:22:00.000-07:00

The answer to the previous post is simple really: Just set up a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that are tied in with lisp routines that have dialog boxes. For instance, CTRL-F might bring up Fixings. What is not that straight forward is setting it all up. Shame Autodesk do not do it out of the box....

Try Photofly from Autodesk Labs. More on this next post.

Grumpy with frustration

2010-07-26T01:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'm very happy with Autocad. Sometimes I get very frustrated. I have to admit part of this is because I am not that organised with blocks etc, although compared to some draftees I am very organised.

Take for instance today, where I am drawing a tank, and want to put some adjustable feet on it.

Easy you say: just pick one already drawn and pinch the feet off that. Ok, but these are M12 A-justa feet, and they look a little puny on this particular tank. So off to the internet and go to the manufacturer's site. Hmmm....this site is a "restricted site"..cannot think why.

Fortunately I have a fairly big library, and locate a brochure I downloaded about 3 years ago.
Humff..have to draw an M16 one.

Hang on a minute! This is drudge drafting...really annoying...is this 2010?..or have I somehow managed to time travel backwards?

My point is that we are still living in the dark ages as far as CAD is concerned, in spite of all the wonderful things like lofting and sweeps that have been given to us. Well, not given exactly, I had to pay for upgrades...

Autodesk could really make things hum for themselves and knock their opposition around really badly: All they have to do is pay some poor person to cruise the internet, see that the product being sold needs drawings and just do them.

After that, post the drawings on some web site:anywhere will do! Then, tie this into Autocad somehow so that getting what we want is quick and easy.

For the curious, the firm that sells these feet is http://www.anzor.co.nz (no, I'm not getting paid for a bit of free advertising!)

There are about 3 main ways that I'm aware of to enable swift insertion of blocks and I use all 3 in this order:

1. Windows Explorer- always open on my second monitor.
2. Tool Palletes, again, always open on the second monitor.
3. Drop down menus.

None of these is that wonderful. There has to be a better way.

The Draftsmans Daily Struggle

2010-07-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

It's winter here in NZ and contrary to what the nice tourist posters tell visually, I can confirm that Auckland in the winter is pretty miserable, with rain most days.

Consequently, I'm frequently telling myself a warm office is a good place to be!

Sometimes I believe me, but I would rather be curled up at home with a good book.

Recently at work I have been asked to do a drawing showing how the hot water piping is run throughout the plant. In a previous go at this, I had a 3D model, which I exploded into lines so that everything was "X-Ray vision".

This did not work out that well as you ended up with a forest of lines which had to be grey to fade into the background. So the latest attempt involved getting a 3D model of the plant and
running my pipes around that. The buildings are just "shells" to minimise clutter, and I xref in the bits of plant that I have drawn previously.

Still not the ideal solution, and just seems a struggle.

The plant is here: http://www.chelsea.co.nz/content/about-chelsea/default.aspx

I'm starting to wonder if my approach is correct.

Want to draw wooden windows then?

2010-06-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

On a previous blog,

http://wlecouteur.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=26

I gabbed on about a sorry saga of making a lisp routine to draw doors and windows.

It has now been posted on my website, if such a beastie is your thing.

The link is: http://bilrocad.com/Architectural%20Lisps/Architectural%20Lisps.html

Autocad as a desk-top publisher

2010-06-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

I recently was asked to do a site layout, just a general map showing where the main buildings were. This was to be a 3D job. As I already had a 3d model, it was relatively simple to chuck a few materials on and render it.

Then the thorny question arose: How to put annotations on a jpg? The silly answer is of course use Microsoft Paint. Silly, because it came out looking like crap!

Once upon a time, I had my own computer at work and my own copy of Corel Photopaint, which would have done the job. Unfortunately, I now work on the firm's supplied computer and the preventers of information technology dept have it so you must ask for such software to be installed. It can be done, but the thought of all the forms and fighting bureaucracy put me right off.

Then the penny dropped: why not use Autocad? Just drop the jpg into modelspace, put the annotations in paperspace-easy.

A CAD Standard

2010-05-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

Here it is - it may not be perfect, but anything is better than nothing!
Unfortunately in the process of getting it here all the formatting is gone....but the info remains!

Introduction
This procedure provides a basis for to produce drawings to NZS5901 (1987), ENGINEERING DRAWING PRACTICE IN NEW ZEALAND using AutoCAD.
This standard also lists the changes to the AutoCAD configuration, and forms a basis for layers, text styles and system variables as required.
All drawing numbers to have prefixes as follows:
L=Layouts
P=PI & IDs
E=Electrical
S=Process Flow Diagrams
　
Paper and Model Space
Place entities as follows:
Paper Space
Title Block at 1:1 Scale
Annotation Text/Dimensions for 3D Views
Parts Lists
Model Space
Object outlines
Dimensions
Annotation Text for 2D views
Sheet Sizes
Drawings to be on A1 Title Block, and usually this is printed on at A3. This means the 3mm high normal text comes out at 1.5mm printed.
Units
All units in millimetres
Plotted Line Width
ALWAYS AN ENTITIES COLOUR SHOULD BE "BYLAYER". Hence whatever layer an entity is on controls its plotted line width
Plotted widths to be 0.05mm, 0.2mm, 0.45mm
The only exception is dimension lines, these are forced to white for the lines only.
Plotting and Scale of Entities
Plot scale is controlled by setting the zoom factor while in Model Space, for instance if the drawing is to be 1:5 scale, you would go to paper space, then enter Model Space by double clicking in a viewport, then type "ZOOM" "1/5xp". Then double click outside the viewport anywhere in paper space to get out of the viewport.
All entities to be drawn in Model Space to be full size, i.e. 1mm=1mm
Limits
These are set to an A1 sheet in the prototype drawing, and are up to the individual user to set, as they may prefer. Remember a grid will not show up unless limits are set to cover the area.
　
　
Layers
For Mechanical Drawings:
These are the layers normally to be used, and come already loaded on the prototype drawing.
Layer Colour Colour No Line type Pen Width (mm) For
0 white 7 continuous 0.05 Blocks written to file*
CL magenta 6 centerx2 0.05 Centrelines
DIM red 1 continuous 0.2 Dimensions
HID magenta 6 hiddenx2 0.05 Hidden Lines
HVY cyan 4 continuous 0.45 Heavy Lines
LGT white 7 continuous 0.05 Light Lines
MED yellow 2 continuous 0.2 Medium Lines
PH grey 253 phantomx2 0.2 Phantom lines
　
For Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs):
Layer Colour Colour No
Valves yellow 2
Product red 1
CIP magenta 6
Equipment Major white 7
Equipment Minor grey 252
Instruments white 7
Instruments-Control white 7
Text white 7
Services-Gas light blue 140
Services-Chemicals Lt Green 83
Services-Liquids Dk Blue 145
Services-Compressed Air Lt purple 213
All linetypes are continuous for PIDs except for CIP, which is centerx2.
　
*NB When you write out a block to the library for other people to use,
put all of it on the 0 layer. In this instance you can make centrelines colour by name and
linetype not by layer. The advantage of this is that when someone brings it into a drawing, they
can put the block on a layer and it will show in that layer’s colours.
Plans and Elevations
These should always be in line with each other, ie if a vertical construction line is drawn through an item in the plan view, it should also go through the corresponding part on the elevation. This usually means that the view to the left of the plan view has the floorline running vertically up the page.
To make this view easier to work on just rotate your UCS by -90 degrees and issue the PLAN command. A lisp routine called RO90 will do this
automatically.
The commands are UCS, Z, -90, enter, Plan, enter.
　
　
　
　
　
Entity Creation Modes

Entity Mode
Colour Bylayer
Dimension line colour White
Dimension extension line colour White
Dimension Text Colour Bylayer
Dimension style "Standard"
Linetype Bylayer
Textstyle Standard

Dimension Variables, and System Variables
1. Ltscale will initially be set at 4 for the prototype drawing so that dashed lines show up.
2. Mirrtext should be set to 1,because you would never want mirrored text.
3. Dimscale will be set to 1 so that if you are starting a drawing at 1:1 you will not need to reset it.
Note that contrary to a lot of common practice, the units are set to 3 decimal places; not zero places as many people set them. The logic in this is that when machined items need 3 decimal places you do not need to reset the units. For normal whole dimensions, ACAD conveniently suppresses the trailing zeros-see the dimzin variable.
A noted drawback of this is that when you are dimensioning a hole in the middle of a piece of 75 wide flat, the dimension will come up as 37.5, giving rise to a tolerance of +/- 0.1mm which is clearly not desired. The fix of course is to enter the dimension manually at the prompt.
Linetypes
Use standard Autocad ACAD.LIN
Text
Heights and pen widths will be:
Entity Height Penwidth Colour
All normal text 3mm 0.3mm bylayer
Large text 4mm 0.5mm bylayer
Fonts
Use Arial
Scales
Category Recommended Scale
Enlargement scales 50:1 20:1 10:1
5:1 2:1
Full Size 1:1
Reduction scales 1:2 1:2.5
1:5 1:10
1:20 1:25
1:50 1:100
1:200 1:500
　
　
Item References
Shall use numbers, not letters. The text height will be 5mm high .The circle to be 10mm diameter.
　
Block Library
These are kept at
Various categories are used in this folder eg bearings\saeco
If drawing say a motor, have a dimensioned drawing showing 3 views,
plus separate plan, side and end views with no dimensions on.
Be verbose with filenames, eg do not put "150kw motor", put for instance:
"Electric Motor-Teco-315s-85r.-plan - 2D"
　
Issue of Drawings
Only the project engineer may issue drawings. A document transmittal (standard form) must go with the drawings and a copy kept in the job file. All drawings must be stamped as to their purpose e.g., construction, for information, for tender etc. The project engineer is responsible to see the drawings are checked in respect to design and dimensioning, before issuing any drawings. The project engineer must sign all drawings issued. A copy of any drawing issued is to be kept on a stick file specific to the job, while the job is in progress. Finalised drawings should be stored in the drawing cabinets.
Sections and Views
On any drawing sheet sections and views start at A and work forwards through the alphabet
　
Appendix
The following lisp routine sets up the layers for PIDs:
　
;Program written by Bill Le Couteur
;Auckland NZ
;Rev 0 date 18/8/97
;This program sets up layers
;the idea is that layer names are set ONLY
;by this routine...and this routine is run every time you open a drawing
;so if as a contractor you change employers, YOU ONLY
;HAVE TO CHANGE THIS ROUTINE
(defun c:laysetPID()
(setq the_layer (getvar "clayer"))
(setq layvalves "valves")
(setq layproduct "product")
(setq laycip "CIP")
(setq layequipmajor "Equipment Major")
(setq layequipminor "Equipment Minor")
(setq layinstruments "Instruments")
(setq layinstrumentscontrol "Instruments-Control")
(setq laytext "Text")
(setq layservicesgas "Services-Gas")
(setq layserviceschem "Services-Chemicals")
(setq layservicesliquids "Services-Liquids")
(setq layservicescair "Services-Compressed Air")
(command "-layer"
"m" layvalves "c" "33" layvalves
"m" layproduct "c" "1" layproduct
"m" laycip "c" "6" laycip
"m" layequipmajor "c" "7" layequipmajor
"m" layequipminor "c" "252" layequipminor
"m" layinstruments "c" "7" layinstruments
"m" layinstrumentscontrol "c" "7" layinstrumentscontrol
"m" laytext "c" "7" laytext
"m" layservicesgas "c" "130" layservicesgas
"m" layserviceschem "c" "111" layserviceschem
"m" layservicesliquids "c" "145" layservicesliquids
"m" layservicescair "c" "213" layservicescair
"m" "TEXT" "c" "120" "TEXT"
"s" the_layer "")
(command "-laYER" "t" "*" "")
(command "-laYER" "unlock" "defpoints" "")
(setvar "blipmode" 0)
(setvar "ltscale" 4)
(command "regenall")
(setvar "CMDECHO" 1)
(princ)
)

Process and Instrumentation Diagrams-P & IDs.

2010-04-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

You can have too much of these. I've been doing a few in the last week or so, and I'm just about all PIDed out. Where I'm working they don't have a standard, so we went with a bunch of symbols that the engineer liked the look of on a previous job. He did not particularly like the ones that I have posted on my site at http://bilrocad.com

There seems to be all sorts of ways of doing a valve unsurprisingly: the ones on my site have little bits of line on the ends of the valves, and they have actuators built in. On his ones, the actuators come as a separate block. Some of them have invisible attributes, some don't.

They are also plainly "old autocad" in that there are no dynamic blocks at all. I have not been a fan of dynamic blocks for normal drafting, but I think they might be the best for PIDs.
If I get enthusiatic enough, I hope to post a set that could do pids.

It looks like a fertile field for lots of lisp macros. On that springs immediately to mind is a routine where you specify 2 points and a line is drawn between the two with maybe a continuation tag at one end and a valve in the line, already inserted.

You can pay for such things, but it seems most people don't, preferring to slog it out with plain Autocad.

There are all sorts of ways of doing pids- I like the tanks drawn in a heavy line-the engineer likes them in grey or very light so that the lines are the emphasis.

Anyone interested in a CAD standard? I have a very lightweight one that just covers the basics.
Maybe next post......

Video Driver for Autocad Fun...not

2010-04-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

As always with a new version of Autocad (R2011) , it is a good idea to update your video driver.
I am lucky enough to have a quadro FX1500, so I duly updated it.

Somewhere along the line, and I'm sorry I cannot remember the exact sequence of steps needed, this all came unstuck. I had text that disappeared after moving, slow everything, viewports that went all funny. Just beore I thought to blame Autocad, I decided to check 3dconfig. There it had a choice of 2 drivers- One Autocad and one that looked like an invdia one.

I changed to Autocad and all was fixed.

Hope this helps someone!

The disappearing draftsman, slips and trips, and DS and DIMLO

2010-04-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

First, The Disappearing Draftsman. Last week I had an interesting viewpoint explained to me by an engineer I'm working with. He had gone ahead and done his own PID's, but needed me to knock them into shape so that they would be presentable, which took a day to do. I'm not sure how long he spent on them, I would imagine at least 4-5 days.

He explained that he found that he could use Autocad as a faster, easier way of producing a sketch of what he wanted than doing a hand sketch. Plus there was an added advantage that the draftsman was only required to do a short "tarting up". The last place he worked, there was a proper drafting department, and they were probably grumpy that he was doing part of their work.

Here at his new work, there is no drafting dept (only me, 2-3 days a month!). So he has to manage somehow.

I have done a few PIDs, but would hardly call myself an expert, so I was interested to hear his take on how they should be done. He reckons, at the quotation stage, you just insert symbols, and leave it at that. You do not use symbols with lots of hidden attributes so that at a future date you can extract a full Equipment List from the job.

The generation of tag numbers, he said, should be the preserve of the Electrical guys, who make a large database. When they have done their thing, and the job is a go, then you can put the tags on.

Slips and trips: I recently had a reasonably complex design to draft. It was a "bag massager".
I came unstuck in one of my drawings: the 20mm plates welded onto a 100x100 axle, somehow got moved by 100mm, this was only in the detail drawing- the main ass'y drawing was correct.

Which made me think: could this have happened in Inventor? Probably not. But I'm stuck with Autocad, so what could I do to prevent this happening again? My only idea is that I make it policy with any assembly to xref in all the parts.

DS and DIMLO: Yet another engineer, at a different plant, has arrived, and he seems keen on doing his own drawings. That is OK by me, because less time working=more time living. He seems pretty good, just a little polishing required in the dimensions department. Namely, he had large arrows and tiny text on his dimensions.

I explained to him the system I use-but I'm not sure he was at all in favour of it, which is to use 2 lisp routines, DS.lsp to set the text height and DIMLO.lsp to insert, then erase a block that has most dimensions styles a mechanical draftsman might need.

In the past done I have done things differently-see a previous post about zero height text.

Here are the two routines:

DS.lsp:

;This routine sets up for text to be right height
;By Bill Le Couteur
(defun c:DS()
(setq skale (getreal "Please enter the plotted scale: "))
(command "-style" "STANDARD" "ARIAL" "0" "1" "0" "" "" )
(if
(tblsearch "style" "R1")(command "-style" "R1" "ARIAL" "0" "1" "0" "" "" ""))
(if (tblsearch "style" "R1-25")(command "-style" "R1-25" "ARIAL" "0" "1" "0" "" "" ""))
(if (tblsearch "style" "R2")(command "-style" "R2" "ARIAL" "0" "1" "0" "" "" ""))
(if (tblsearch "style" "R5")(command "-style" "R5" "ARIAL" "0" "1" "0" "" "" ""))

(setvar "MIRRTEXT" 0)

(setvar "DIMSCALE" SKALE)
(setq the_textsize (* skale 3))
(setvar "textsize" the_textsize)
(setvar "dimassoc" 2)
(princ))

The nice thing about this is if you have an existing drawing an someone has used the style R5 say, then you can change that at the same time as well.

Here is DIMLO.lsp

;This routine sets up for dims and text;
By Bill Le Couteur
;imports a dummy block containing a set of dimension styles
(defun c:Dimlo()
(command "-insert" "c:/cad/library/symbols/dimension styles" "0,0" "1" "1" "0")
(command "erase" "l" "")
(princ)
)

A very simple routine-I have no idea why Autodesk don't have a magic button that does all this...

Of course, many will argue that you need to set up your prototype drawing nicely, with all the needed scales and the text the right size, and this is correct, except what happens when you change scales? As well, if you purge the drawing your nicely setup scales that are not used are ditched, so if you want to use a 1:20 dimension style, it won't be there.

Autocad 2011

2010-04-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

There is not much point me going into the user interface etc etc as you could go to, say,Robin Capper's excellent blog at http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/ where he does a good job of giving a run down on R2011. You might have to reverse through to the post, as he seems to be churning them out!

So, I'll just outline my experiences with it and hope that someone gets around a few of the things that I found as I proceeded to waste my Easter weekend drawing a set of instructions for a do-it-yourself cabinet assembly.

On firing up for the first time I noticed: No toolbars. Well, it turns out that they are still there, just hidden-I guess that Autodesk want you to move towards the Ribbon system. Here is a snip of my screen setup, just of the ribbon, shown vertically as I have two screens:

(By the way, there is a snipping tool in Vista-look under Accessories)

How to get your toolbars? Just to the right of the Quick Access Toolbar there is a small triangle.

Press this and locate "Show Menu Bar". Then go Tools/Toolbars/Autocad and tick the ones you want.

Another fun annoyance, was the helpful popups that appeared in the top right hand corner.

On pressing "Don't show me this again" it appeared yet again, and again. A friend told me that they were all different ones and that after a while all sorts would be eliminated. Makes sense, really, because you want your new users to be looked after.

A lot of new changes are not immediately apparent- for instance the loft command has been overhauled to allow for surface creation. Previously, the dialog box came up automatically, now you have to use the Settings option to make it come up.

As usual with new releases, I tread carefully, making sure I do regular backups.

The neatest things I'm finding are:

*The materials system has been overhauled and is looking good.

*Hatching has had a lot of work done on it and seems much better.

*Polylines are a lot nicer to edit - but old habits die hard!

*There is a new display bar on the right of the screen which has the often used orbit button on it, and the "Steering Wheel" which I have not been using but have been driven to because of it's handy little button marked "Center" which is great if you want to reset the orbit center graphically.

Title block pain

2010-03-31T19:20:00.000-07:00

Just plodding my way through (pardon the pun) a bunch of Hazardous Area drawings and it was pointed out the the company logo had gone all funny. This is on about 40 drawings.

If you had 2 or 3 drawings you would just reinsert the block, redefining the old one. So you would think a script would be the go. This where I found out my ignorance regarding the insert command.

After some digging on the net I came up with parts to make this one:

-insert
A3BORDER_LAND_MECH=
Y
(command)

An explanation:

-insert ......just issues the insert command without the dialog box.
A3BORDER_LAND_MECH....is the name of the title block, and the = means that you wish to redefine it.
Y is the answer to the prompt "Do you want to redefine the block?"
(command) ....is a means of cancelling the script-does not make much sense but it works!

Just one catch-you have to put the location of the directory of the block in file locations in autocad. Go Tools/Options etc.

Just use the cui to make yourself a button and you just click when you want the block redefined.

From igloos to elephants

2010-03-21T01:44:00.001-07:00

More architectural monstrosities-yes I know the curves do not match, yes I know there does seem to be no means of support in some of these...but hey, it's Sunday and I have limited time!

I'm not quitting my day job just yet!

It is strange- this house design is supposed to be about olives (it is near an olive farm), hence the shape of the rooves, but things have ended up resembling upside down boats and elephants.

This is just a massing exercise. Sometimes you wonder what you need walls for out in the country-the only place I can think one might be needed is the toilet/bathroom and say a sound barrier if one had a baby...so the outer walls could be totally glass, but this means lots of dollars.Though if you were to have such a house, cost might not be an issue.

A draftsman's lot and architectural fantasies

2010-03-06T01:11:00.000-08:00

Being a draftsman is a bit like doing a maths exam every day, one where you should not make mistakes at all. But ask yourself: who ever scores 100% day in day out? All we can hope for is that our mistakes are minor and easily fixed.

I remember the story of one draftsman who drew an entire truckload of ducting. On the day it was delivered, he was looking out the window. As soon as he saw it he realised they were all completely wrong.

Another, an architectural designer, was awoken at 2 am in the morning. Apparently the irate person on the phone accused him of bad design of a deck because there had been a party and a large number of people were on the deck and it collapsed resulting in some injuries. A real shock to him, but he was later vindicated as it was found the builder had just nailed the stringer support to the house instead of using coach bolts!

Anyway, I seem to be sliding back into drawing houses for fun-it is great, just as long as you do not intend to build them!

The "flying saucer" one came from a vision I had of standing inside a house and looking upwards and seeing the sky: ie a hole in the roof! Hardly original. Maybe the glob below the hole made of chrome is though (probably not!). The "pears laid on the ground" one is again probably not original, but has the "looking at the sky while inside" thing going as well.

Batch processing of Autocad drawings

2010-02-20T12:32:00.000-08:00

Some years ago (about 12!) I played around with scripts and lisp routines to automate the plotting of drawings. So when a co-worker asked me if I knew of a downloadable routine that could search a series of drawings for a text string, I thought: I'll just rejig my old routines and there we are.

Not really. He was after a system that would search electrical drawings for numbers. The reason for this is that say you have wire number 39 on one drawing, then you want to know where this wire number is on other drawings (maybe the drawing system is at fault here!). Just to add to the fun, some things are attributes, not text. Probably if you looked, you would find some mtext in there as well.

This is all hanging on your finding a thing that will open several drawings in succession.

I have looked, but most of them you have to pay for. To cut a long story short I found the ideal thing-just for opening up drawings: and for free!

I have tested it out by reinserting and updating a title block.

The number finding thing will have to wait.

The routine can be found here:

http://thatcadguy.blogspot.com/2009/10/batch-processing-autocad-drawings.html

There is a trick to it's use-Navigate to the directory, and then select the first file.
Otherwise, it works brilliantly, (yes, I did leave a comment).

Maybe someone at Autodesk might read this and consider putting it in Express Tools?

Whats bin did and what's bin hid

2010-02-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

If you are a little older, you will recognise the title as one from an LP made by Donavan in the 1960's. I thought I might be forgiven for pinching it.

I have been trying (empasise on trying!) to draw a Flying boat from the 1950's.

The pic shows progress so far.

If you are keen on looking at Flying Boat Pics, then here is a good place

http://www.msacomputer.com/FlyingBoats-old/short/Short.html

My approach to the fuselage was to draw the individual frame shapes and then loft them, hoping that if I drew the inside as well, I would end up with a hollow aeorplane. Sadly, this approach came unstuck and I had to regress to a solid all the way through one. At the tail I lost patience (never a good plan if you want things to go right!) and drew the tail section as a chunk and tried carving bits off it. Not a good way to go, but I have resigned myself to the idea that this is just a first pass.

The process of getting information, ie PLANS was a bit of a trial. I ended up with a Short Seaford (not Solent) as my pdf of choice.

16 Days of Revit Left

2010-01-16T00:05:00.000-08:00

It might as well be 2 minutes, as I go back to work on Tuesday, and have a pile of things to between here and there. Things like going to Goat Island Bay and looking at the fish.

As you can see I did not get very far. If you look really hard you might see all the rafters, purlins and fascia boards. For flying rafters, I had to create a family of them - all slanting at 10 degrees.

My thinking was that I wanted to model as much as possible of the underlying roof structure.

I have experimented with various ways of creating purlins-sometimes modelling in place, sometimes creating a family for them.

My conclusion, and I admit here that it is not a very informed one, is that Revit is great if you are drawing multi-story buildings. I'm not so sure about ordinary domestic houses, except where you are happy to represent a roof structure as a slab. This is probably how it is used in real life?

No doubt as your library of families is built up, life would be a lot easier, and quicker. With Autocad the same rule must also apply, except they are called blocks not families.

I considered starting the roof over the garage, and just thinking about it was enough!

Who knows, maybe I'll try copying the lounge roof over and just modifying it?

How not to learn Revit...

2010-01-13T00:04:00.000-08:00

This is how far I have got, in between having a day off and putting unwanted stuff on the local internet market.

Two conclusions:
1. Putting in walls and windows in Revit: easy.
2. Constructing floor structures and roof structures:a bit harder!
When it came to putting in the floor structure, things seemed to go a lot slower for some reason-most likely because I was doing things for the first time, and did not realise there was a multiple copy. (There is, you just have to look for the checkbox).

I downloaded a roof truss from somewhere but things came to a bit of a halt when I had to alter the existing family. This was when I realised that I had not quite understood families and creating them. So I spent most of the day trying to make a sloped rafter, even getting as far as making a bird's mouth at the lower end, which caused quite a few problems.

Maybe I have missed something, but I would have thought that a plain old rafter would have come with the package. It probably is, but is called something like "Structural Effects".
I can see that the English are on to the fact that the Americans speak American. For instance a "notch" in English is "coping" in American.

It has been a frustrating experience, but just reinforces what someone has said previously:"You can learn by yourself, but you will take less time if you have training".

After the last try, I found my rafter coming through as an elevation in a plan view, so I tossed the toys out of the cot and went and mowed the lawn. (Yes, I do know what I did wrong!)

Maybe I'm like a lot of those crusty old Autocad users: Don't show me anything new: my mind is made up. It just seems working in Autocad is wonderfully precise and extremely flexible: you can quickly draw anything you want. It's just that it is not parametric.

I seem to be stuck in the family editor, doing things the "correct" way (by my way of thinking!)
only to be greeted with error dialog boxes saying things like "reference dimensions are no longer parallel " and so on. Going to Youtube is no good as the tutorials there do not cover a sloping item such as a rafter.

As an Autocad user, you find yourself keying in things like "M" for move, when you should be pressing a button. Visibility states are another minefield for an Autocad user: there ain't no layers!

When you finally find out a way to hide something, it's gone forever because the way to get it back is not the same button or next to it!

Autocad to Revit...Notes of an Autocad user

2010-01-05T19:32:00.000-08:00

A successful install of Revit Architecture 2010. Whaddaya mean there's no tutorials???

Well, says R, they are a separate download. Oh...Ok. All sorts of downloads going to the wrong directories and much shuffling later...

I have ground my way through the tutorials, missing things like room spaces etc.

Being an impatient type, I thought it would be good to redo a previously done house drawn in 2D Autocad to see how it compared. (Yes, I know I should not have done it in 2D--it just reinforces for me that 2D is a crazy way of drawing.) This particular drawing I remember well because in the early stages the client wanted a print. Being a "work in progress" there were things wrong.

He got very cranky, so this has taught me the lesson that you do not give anyone a "rough" drawing. I'm not a particularly fussy person, but I'm sure that there is sweat and blood on that drawing...even if it is a PDF!

The above shows progress so far- about 3 hours. The house is a bit deceptive as it has 2 levels on the ground floor.

Putting in things like walls, doors and windows is fairly easy, once you get used to the idea that if the standard version is not what you want, you just duplicate it, and rename it as something else, then alter that one.

Another head scrambler is the fact that all you ever need is already drawn for you: your job is just to fit it and modify it to what you want.

I'm half way between huge admiration for this product and frustration with how things are done.

Another neat way to learn is to go to Youtube and type in say "Revit Stairs". There are some very good presentations there.

Another thing that really surprised me was the connection to Autodesk Seek-

http://seek.autodesk.com/

This seems to be a huge depository of components such as baths, sinks etc.

(Note in the standard install they cleverly hide bathroom fittings under "Drainage"-go figure!)

Equally surprising was the lack of sliding windows- sure you can go places where you have to register/pay for such things, but even they have only 2 panels, not 3.

Or am I missing something? (Probably!)

On a video roll

2010-01-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

I've gone mad with the uploading of videos to Youtube. The latest is for
handrails to be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJ4ZNz3rhk

I hope that I'm getting better at doing these- a friend suggested I work on a smaller
screen size and have the autocad background set to white, which seems to produce
a much better result.

Now, back to that Revit tutorial....

Xmas Madness continues

2010-01-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

It's all too much: Xmas food, holidays, being able to decide what to do each day.

So the mad part is I have downloaded a trial copy of Revit to see what it is about.

Just to be totally inconsistent, I downloaded Java netbeans integrated development environment as well.

It just allows you to "easily" make java programs. That is, if you can figure out what the heck is going on!

Even worse, I have downloaded a screen video capture program called CamStudio and after much searching for a microphone produced a video. The trick (I have not mastered it yet) is to have the settings so that the file size is low. It is just a short 3 minute demo of my pipe lisp.

It can be found at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZsVUjbRWO4

Maybe it's time for a break..

2009-12-19T13:07:00.001-08:00

The picture shows a pair of double doors. Just opening a set of these, it would never occur to you that there are two different styles (the uprights on the left and right), and what a pain they have caused. They must overlap in the middle, and this has been a bit of a trial.

Anyway, this window stuff is now finished, and unless my friend R wants a set of horizontally sliding doors, or windows that slide up and down, this is now a project done.

That is, unless I get excited about doing a costing part.

The next project is to do a bit on Java. How this can be connected to Autocad I'm not sure and what the next project should be I'm not sure. Maybe it is just the time of year.

I had a flash of the blinding obvious regarding drawing of houses. It seems that almost every part of a house model is controlled by the floor plan. If you could have a program that generates a set of foundation plans automatically from a floor plan?

Same with the roof. Which just leaves the walls and windows. The exterior walls would be controlled by the floor perimeter, so they are covered. The exterior walls are then able to be enumerated and so windows as a separate item could be assigned to a particular wall.

That leaves just the interior walls. Maybe these are controlled by the "room usage"?

Which comes back to Java: I know this is an object oriented language and I have done a bit of research on it and it seems very good.

It now occurs to me that someone else has thought of all of the above, and is possibly feverishly putting the finishing touches on a program which, unfortunately, will put a lot of architects out of work.

Just finished bashing my head against the keyboard

2009-12-12T20:19:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought doing a lisp for the above item would take hours and damn hours?
I have an all too convenient cold at the moment (this stops me from running/riding a bike/walking etc)-so I have had time to finish this one. I'm not terribly proud of the way I have written this one-no planning, just hack away until it was finished. Bring on object oriented programming for lisp (maybe that is what visual lisp is?).

The next steps might be to make it a bit more user friendly (it is all command line stuff).
I have given it to my friend who typically might take 3/4 hr to draw a window in 2D.
I'm hoping he can do one in 5 minutes using this one.

Another next step might be to do one for doors, then a quotation/costing/cutting list add-on, but this would be a real time-burner.

My Next Project

2009-12-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

Hmphhh! Seems nobody wanted my handrail routine. Oh well, as I said I'm going to get fun out of it.

Now for the next pile of frustration: A lisp set that does wooden joinery,ie windows (or called millwork in the USA). A friend of mine recently bought an English program that costs up joinery, so maybe I'll add to my drawing part to create a saleable item. I think I'm done now with giving some things away for free.

Progress has been slow-it is now at the stage shown in the pic.

I'm realising in my travels that there are some drawings done by architects of joinery, but most of these only have a passing nod at doing things to scale. It seems nowhere is there an "engineering" type of scale drawing exactly how joinery is constructed.

Now Anyone can draw handrails

2009-11-20T20:04:00.000-08:00

Finally. The baby has arrived. hrail.lsp that is. A difficult birth, accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Just as well that I was forced to take some days off work, otherwise it might never have been done. Last weekend it was "finished", that is until I tried it out on a real drawing: it crashed and burned when the pline had an elevation greater than 0.

I'm quite surprised that I managed to debug it today and get it ready to roll. It was a neat feeling to see it doing it's thing in the end.

Which makes me wonder why I should spend my limited time left on planet earth doing stuff that I end up giving away for free? Probably just mad. Seriously, I have wanted one of these for years now-and if nobody else wants it, big deal: I'm going to get a lot of fun out of using it.

It's a bit like someone doing crosswords-just a bit of a challenge and exercise for the brain, and if someone else gets some use, good.

It makes use of a dialog box, offering use of 6 different types (see the previous blog). The idea is to draw a pline CLOCKWISE around the floor edge of your steel platform, issue the hrail command, make your choices, and pick the pline to get the results shown above.

I'm making the files available only by email request to gauge if anyone is interested.

See http://bilrocad.com/Lisps3d.html for instructions on use.

I can be emailed on bill@bilroCad.com

Handrails: The final solutions?

2009-11-13T16:14:00.000-08:00

This handrail business is turning into an obsession for me. I'm hoping to move on by putting it to bed once and for all. At present work where I'm at is tailing off, so I'm busy going to the movies and generally taking things far too easy. I''m hoping to finally nail the handrail lisp routine which I have almost finished, and will post it as soon as it is finished. Before Xmas?
To this end I can present 5 different versions, the dwg files of which can be found at:
http://bilrocad.com/Structural/Structural.html
The jpgs which follow are of these different types. Each has it's advantages and disadvantages.
For instance Type A has the advantage of the stanchion doing two purposes: one as support and the second as a capping.
If I had to pick one, it would be Type C as it looks the best and has minimal welding. For stainless steel, a Type F would be the cheapest to install, and does not look that bad.
Please note that these handrails may or may not conform to the standards applicable in your country. I'm sure that some will say they know of another 10 variations on the handrail theme,
if you are interested in these being in the listing, contact me at bill@bilrocad.com

Finding the mass of a solid using Autocad

2009-11-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

You may know of the Autocad command "MASSPROP". A very useful command when you have drawn an item in a 3D solid and wish to calculate the volume or mass of it. If your model is made up of many solids you might have to take a copy of them and run the union command on them, to make them all one piece.

Unfortunately, all it gives is the volume, and in my case in cubic millimetres, so you have to usually convert it to cubic metres and then multiply that by 7850 which is the density of steel in kg/cubic metre.

To shortcut all this I have written a lisp that does all this for you.

Before running the routine, which can be found at my website, http://bilrocad.com ,please make a directory called "bilro" off your c: drive, ie c:\bilro, othewise it won't work. If you want to put it somewhere else, fine, but be sure to alter the two places in the routine where it reads and writes to a file-have a look, they are easy to spot!

How it works:
1. It issues the Autocad command MASSPROP and when asked if it wants to write to a file, it does so, putting it at c:\bilro
2. It then opens up this file and using a counter skips down the first five lines to locate the volume.
3. The final part just multiplies the volume x 7850 to give an aswer in kg on the command line.

You will see that in the process of doing it's thing it sets filedia to 0, which suppresses file dialog boxes. If this routine ever crashes, to set things back to normal, type filedia at the command prompt and set it to 1, otherwise you have to use the command line to open drawings.

Happy massing!

Vaguely Autocad Related....

2009-11-02T23:23:00.001-08:00

This set of renders I did about 4 years ago. At the time I was helping a friend with his architectural stuff. I must have had a bit of time on my hands because I had a little go at finding out doing architecture is not as easy as you might think!

These I have to admit are not wonderful renders-I've posted them as a series, starting at the top, showing how a design can metamorphose. My friend had a preference for Corten Steel, so this had a slight influence, as did things going wrong with materials-see the gold crinkly one.

In the end we did not get the job, but I had fun finding out I'm not an architect.

I can look back now and see that the design was a bit "office building"

The Wunnerful World of Xrefs

2009-09-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Xrefs....love them or hate them? In my normal course of work, I do not really need to use them because most of my drawings are of simple things. Occasionally I have to do a large layout, so instead of cluttering up the model with sectional views, I write these out to separate files, which are in turn xreffed into an output drawing.

Recently a friend got me to check out how quick my computer was printing a PDF. His drawing was full of xreffed in bits and pieces. What was interesting, was that he was xreffing back into
the components, the main layout! So, when the layout was opened, I got a message saying "circular reference detected, breaking reference". He explained that this was the clever way to ensure that components ended up in the correct place. Clever indeed.

Recently, I have had a small tank and piping job to do for a consultancy. So I thought what a good place to experiment with circular references and so on. I knew of a thing called refedit, but never used it much. On this job though, I found that if you right click, there is an option to use refedit. I'm now convinced that this is the way to go, as you can use the geometry of the other things in the layout to position parts on a component drawing.

I think sometimes you can overdo xreffing-after all: you have drawn a pump - is it likely to change? No.

The set of drawings created makes much use of viewports using conceptual shading: try it, you will like it!

I was able to make great use of pip and pipeset lisp routines for this job (see earlier posts and my website http://www.bilroCAD.com for info). Of course the first comment from someone was "Does it produce a BOM?" to which the answer is no. Maybe one day.

Just a short trip to heaven and back...

2009-08-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

Oops. Now I'm back. In the course of my whining about lack of work, one of my friends donated me a customer that he was too busy to deal to. Only a day and a half. A brand new computer at this place. Quad core, FX3700 graphics card (high end!), 24" monitor...woopee!
How come nobody wants to know about all this wonderfulness? Guess I'm just a geek after all.

On the first day, I found it did not let dialog boxes display (R2010) and the pgp file had partially gone, so on the second day I asked if I could do a "repair installation". This was a success and things were a lot easier, so I decided to check 3dconfig. It was set to software acceleration. A bit strange as it had a high end Nvidia card, so I set it to hardware and checked out a shaded view....very smooth!

It was using Vista, which did not seem to slow it down much (it did a bit).
I got a bit faded after 10 hrs on the second day, doing a factory layout, in 2D.

Then back to the "other" place, to revisit the small platform. Oh dear...It seems what looked OK as a layout turns out to have serious flaws, like for instance the top step having a rise of 300mm!
I spent a day knocking it into shape and doing the detail drawings. Funny how starting the details brings out all the mistakes made!

I'm also shaking at the knees about a large 300kg duct that they are going to install by dropping through the roof with a helicopter. I find out this week on Monday.

Shaded views: I'm trying out a new policy (just to see if anyone will notice)-plotted viewports are now using conceptual shading. I think it makes the drawings look a lot more realistic than just hidden lines.

Just a short reinstall....

2009-08-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

I started work at another place, while still having not left the last place. How does that work? Well the first place did not have enough work to keep me busy and the other place wanted a tiny platform drawn. Two days should have been more than enough. I brought my two year old computer with me and hooked it up to the printer server.

From here on , glue seemed to enter it's innards. The keeper of the server muttered things like: "free anti-virus no good, get external hard drive, don't do OS updates, don't involve yourself in any OS after Windows 2000". Needless to say the platform was no where near finished.

After two days of glue I decided to take to my computer on the Saturday and give it a good thrashing. In other words a C: drive reformat and reinstall of Vista, followed by reinstalling R2010 Autocad.

I arrived at 11.00am and left at 6pm. A day wasted and yet not wasted.
The first time waster was installing a new copy of Nortons: All it found after about 900,000 files, was a tracking cookie. Not that I would not do this again as I suspected a virus being the cause.

The second time waster was saving all the crap that I had collected onto my nice shiny new external hard drive. Funny how 60 MBits/sec looks just like 60MB/sec. It takes forever...

Ok now, lets see, (about 2pm now), how to reformat that hard drive? Just put the Vista disc in and do a restart?

Hmmm...that did not work. Half an hour later and after much hair removal, I happened to notice my motherboard documentation. Like the part that says "Press F2 while starting up to get your BIOS setup screen". Looks like the nice people who installed it originally, made the boot up order 1. Hard Drive, 2 CD Drive. Change this around and off we go.

Eventually, Vista is installed. In hind sight, this is where I should have decided to update the OS. As it happened, I decided to put the Autocad on, and at the same time I was doing that, I think the updates were being downloaded. This may have caused my problems when I installed the Autocad. It really struggled with .NET Framework, and after about an hour gave up and installed the other parts of Autocad.

Here is where I said to myself: "Ok it says .NET was not installed, but I'll try it anyway". It took about 2 minutes before it crashed. So this is where I downloaded .NET Framework from Microsoft and installed it as a separate item.

This appeared to work, and a much friskier Autocad appeared. Opening drawings still takes a little longer than it should, but this may be a network problem as the keeper of the network complained that he has had a lot of network errors, all only happening when I am attached....

At this stage I noticed the notice saying "Install your updates now". All 57 of them. Takes a while! (I had chosen the "install essential updates only")

I hope someone reading this can gain some ideas from the above if they find themselves in a similar situation.

But wait....there's more!

2009-07-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

Further to the cunning plan for a pdf-dwg partnership: This does not allow for the fact that quite often we make use of tabs in a drawing, which leads to the unfortunate case where we might have Layout 1 being issue B and Layout 2 could be issue C.

What then? Well, how about naming such drawings as 1234XB.dwg? The X would indicate that this is a multi-layout drawing and the B would mean that at least one of the layouts was issue B.

This still does not get around the problem of the pdf viewing person knowing if say Layout 1 was up to date or not. A possible solution could be a simple txt file kept in the same directory, named the same as the drawing, for instance 1234X.txt. In this file might be:
1234-01A
1234-02B
The program mentioned in the previous post might access this file and display these contents.

The hard part is, now we have loaded up the poor old draftsman with yet another piece of beaurocracy, the last thing he needs. I have seen somewhere a program (lisp/script) that does do updating of revisions-maybe this might be the method?

A search for an Autocad Viewer

2009-07-22T15:59:00.001-07:00

Ah....Progress. Once upon a time our network enabled us to have access to our c: drives and if we asked our administrator nicely, he would install such goodies as the free Autodesk Viewer called True View. Due to whatever, this access was removed-probably it is safer that way! We are now administered from a different country.

New network whatsits were duly installed, and True View was removed (they said it clashed with the network...) and replaced with a different one. The replacement however, was obviously designed only for use with 2D drawings. Apparently, in some countries, 2D drawings are all the rage! So I guess it's my fault for doing all those 3D drawings.

Feeling a bit guilty, I have started a search for a drawing viewer that can view and print 3D Autocad drawings.

My first port of call was eDrawings, from SolidWorks. On first use, this appeared to do the job, but to get hidden views, you have to shade the viewport. On shading, the hiding appears not to be 100%, although I suppose if one were stuck it could be used. I have to say that in model space the shaded model works really well with my Quadro 1500 card. The only hitch with the 3D orbit being that it could do with an "Autocad Style" constrained orbit tool. Anybody listening at Solidworks?

One of my suggestions a year ago was to just have me print out the drawing as a PDF and store that on the network drive. After all, everyone has Adobe Reader, right? It was pointed out there is one serious flaw with this idea: How can anyone be sure that that this PDF is the latest issue? Which brought up the curly subject of issues.

Where I work, I am mostly the only draftsman, and most of the drawings are for internal use. So we have been relaxed about issues, just occasionally doing them, not really serving any purpose. The drawings that I know may get issued outside, get revisions.

There is an answer of sorts here: If the file is labelled say 1234B.dwg and the pdf is 1234B.pdf, then we can be reasonably sure that they are in sync. Maybe the answer is a small program that acts as a front end, so if say a person wants a particular file, they look it up using this program, which checks the filename of the pdf against the dwg filename, then shells out to a viewer such as Adobe or Foxit. By the way, Adobe/Foxit, if you are listening, how about checking how Autocad uses the mouse for zooming and panning?

One of the next viewers I tried, which will remain nameless, did not seem to run on Vista, so I could not try it out.

Two screens or not two screens?

2009-07-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

My new work computer came with one screen, a 22" widescreen. Initially, I thought, let's not be too precious here....I can work on one screen just like all the other draftees I know.

The answer was, yes, you can, but what a pain! What I really missed was the properties pallete, and the tool palletes. When I first looked at the back of the little HP, I could only see a vga port, indicating to me that this would only take one screen.

One of my fellow workers then pointed out that there was another outlet and that you could indeed have two screens. The other port looked just like a USB, but apparently is a special HP thing for having another screen. It needed a special adaptor to connect to my 20" Philips LCD, but apart from that I was soon up and running. My old computer looks a bit minimalist now, with just a 17" screen.

At this point I realised how faded the old monitor had become-or was it always like that?!
I have turned brightness to 100% and upped the contrast, so it is still usable.

Them there pesky variables

2009-06-26T01:58:00.000-07:00

I'm now working on another computer, and I have just realised how many things Autocad sets a certain way, which mostly I want to change.

For instance, VTENABLE. Hmm.....let me see...do I want pretty zooms or fast zooms? Set to 3 huh? Let's just chop that down to 0. That's better!

That is an example of a variable you can set once and it stays that way. There are others, which appear to be related to the drawing at hand, and for these I have a "blast 'em all" lisp that knocks them into the way I like them, at the same time sets all the layers that I use as standard.

I call this one Layset.lsp (It sets the layers!)- It does the extra task of creating variables for the layer names. You can see the variables, just at the top of the routine.

The plan here is that if you want to force something onto the "Medium" layer, then another lisp is used, mm.lsp and this makes use of the variable set up in Layset to change the item chosen to the preferred layer.

A full explanation of this system can be found on my website, http://www.bilroCAD.com

Notice it does not have to worry about what that layer might be called. The ; marks are ignored by Autocad, ie they are used for comments. Here it is:

;Program written by Bill Le Couteur
;Auckland NZ
;Rev 0 date 18/8/97
;This program sets up layers
;the idea is that layer names are set ONLY
;by this routine...and this routine is run every time you open a drawing
;so if as a contractor you change employers, YOU ONLY
;HAVE TO CHANGE THIS ROUTINE
(defun c:layset()
(setvar "CMDECHO" 0) ;just hides the display related to this routine
(setvar "HIDEPRECISION" 1);when plotting, if this is set to 0, sometimes cylinders are missing
;a vertical line
(setvar "facetratio" 1); improves the quality of meshes for cylinders etc
(setvar "dispsilh" 1);suppresses the mesh display of solids
(setvar "facetres" 7);improves the smoothness of shaded objects etc
(setq the_layer (getvar "clayer"))
(setq laycentre "cl")
(setq laydim "dim")
(setq layhid "hid")
(setq laymedium "MED")
(setq laylight "LGT")
(setq layheavy "HVY")
(setq layphantom "pha")
(setq laytext "text")
(command "viewres" "" 50)
(command "-layer" "m" laycentre "c" "6" laycentre "lt" "centerx2" laycentre
"m" laydim "c" "1" laydim
"m" layhid "c" "6" layhid "lt" "hiddenx2" layhid
"m" laymedium "c" "2" laymedium
"m" laylight "c" "7" laylight
"m" layheavy "c" "4" layheavy
"m" layphantom "c" "252" layphantom "lt" "phantomx2" layphantom
"m" laytext "c" "4" laytext
"s" the_layer "")
(setvar "blipmode" 0)
(setvar "ltscale" 4)
(command "regenall")
(setvar "CMDECHO" 1)
(princ)
)

Computer Hardware

2009-06-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

A while back I talked about specs for a new computer. Well, it arrived last Monday, bought by the place where I work. Specs, as far as I could tell, are 3 GHz, 2 MB ram, on board Intel graphics, 22" LCD monitor, running XP on a network. I assumed quite wrongly that my 2 year old computer, a core 2 duo at 2.66Ghz and an Nvidia Quadro 1500 ($NZ1000) would kick it's bum.

But no. It had near enough the same 3D performance, which I found after loading the same heavy drawing and running a side by side test. The test was not all that scientific, just shade the model and roll it around to see when it goes to wireframe. In general, I have found it a much snappier and nicer to use machine, apart from the lack of a second monitor.

I was peeved, since making all sorts of honking noises about on board graphics before it arrived. It may be part of my unlevel playing field is that I'm using Vista. Maybe I can downgrade to XP or the next windows?

Electrical Drawings...grump grump....

2009-05-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

How low do I go? Electrical drawings is how low. Still, it's all part of the work and it is only occasional. Just to add to the fun I decided we needed a super duper way to extract from an Excel spreadsheet the data needed to fill out a PLC card.
This was done by saving the file as a csv file, in other words a text file, but one where the columns have been replaced by commas.
Once this has been done, PLC.lsp is flung into action in the right drawing (ie a PLC card drawing with blank spaces). This inserts all the relevant blocks with all the right info at the correct positions.
It works, but one of the problems is that the description might be on 3 lines while the spreadsheet only supplies one cell. So an advanced version of this would need to parse the description string, analyse how many words it had and split it up accordingly.
Maybe next weekend.....

Everyone Draws Rectangular Flanges, don't they?

2009-04-25T17:42:00.000-07:00

The other day I got sick of drawing yet another rectangular flange.
I thought: get smart-someone else must have done a lisp for this.
But no. At least as far as I looked- which was not all that far.
There was one found but it did not perform the way I wanted, so
I decided to write my own. Needless to say it appears to have
taken a day and half out of my life.

It occurs to me now, that my time would probably have been
spent better watching TV or taking Rose for a walk.

Anyway, it was a vague sort of challenge, and it is finished now.
One of it's features is that it does produce 3D solids when it
has finished. It also flies in the face of "traditional" methods
of spacing of bolts. Normally in the old days a draftee would
work out the bolt centres (theoretical) then choose the nearest
value to make the centres. For instance, he might have calculated
137.5mm as the hole centres. To make the drawing not have the
dreaded 0.5 or the "hard to read" 137, he would have said
nearest is 140mm. Then the dimension between the end hole
and the next one in might have ended up at say 122mm.

I have suddenly had an epiphany: all the flanges I have been
drawing lately have been laser cut. So who cares if the hole
centres are 137.5mm? Not me. Especially when it
made this routine a lot easier to write. No doubt the
traditionalists out there will be pouncing on me for being
so outrageous!

Here is the dialog box - where you fill in all the variables.

It does make the layers "Front Flange", "Back Flange"
and"Gasket", otherwise it does not appear to do anything
drastic to your drawing. I have made it so that it can be used
in an existing drawing-ie you don't have to run it in a new drawing.
I have had the odd situation (which I could not make it repeat)
where it seemed to lose the plot and put the holes in the
wrong place-almost as it the snapmode had gone nuts.

When I checked osmode, I got something like 16477,which is
a strange one, considering the whole thing just uses
standard commands and hopefully does not reuse Autocad's
reserved commands like angle and so on.
An extension I did consider was to insert bolts/nuts and washers.

Then I thought...hmmm...anyone else going to use this routine?
One way to find out is to make it only available as an emailed request.

To get the routine, just email me at bill@bilroCAD.com As part
of the deal, could you tell me if it worked-how well, or any crashes,
and especially if you got any use out of it.

Filleting Polylines

2009-04-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

Exciting stuff, huh! oh well....
In my ponderous progress towards writing a lisp that does steel handrails, I came across
a little corner of Autocad I had not realised was available: If you go Fillet, you are given the option to fillet a polyline. You just pick the polyline and it fillets every corner in one go. How often the average user would need this I'm not sure, but it sure does come in handy for my handrail routine!

Not really Autocad...but where to put it?

2009-04-02T20:18:00.000-07:00

One of my hobbies is to play around with a bit of programming.

I have looked at Basic, C, Autolisp, VB6, VBA and now I have downloaded
the freebie from Microsoft, VB 2008 Express Edition.

I can say that this represents an improvement of VB6, at least as far as the
small amount of things I have asked of it so far. I downloaded it to make a
small program, which, hopefully, will be needed where I work....

This post is essentially a repeat of my site at http://bilroCAD.com/Risk Analysis.html

This is the new program as it runs: it consists of two dialog boxes,and amounts to pressing buttons and selecting from lists. Once the program is run, it creates a text file-see listing below for that one.

This is the contents of a typical text file the program produces:

Task Analysis

Date Created:2009-04-02

The Task: Remove Beams

The Plant:Porana Rd

Permits: glass permit

Personal Protection: safety goggles

Equipment: gas sets

Step No: 1

The Action: Remove old conveyor
Hazard: gas

Type of Control: Eliminate

Means of Control: ,chemical isolations,standby personnel

You can see that this is site specific and could not be used on other plants. Why am I posting this here? To see if anyone is interested in such a program.You can email me at bill@bilrocad.com
A more general program would be identical, except the Plant and the Location boxes would extract their items from 2 separate text files, created by the user. I would imagine a fair price for the program might be US$20.
Another option might be a customised one that can only be used by your firm-the logo shown (mine) can easily be replaced by one that your firm uses.

Limitations are:

1. You have to make a directory c:\Task Analysis

2. The output is to a text file, which if you wanted to alter fonts and so on, then you would need to open the file in MS Word instead of Notepad.

3. At the moment the file output name is the same as the date. This means that if you do more than one on the same day, it just appends it to the file created before on that day.

4. It does not allow for multipages-for instance you might have Step No: 7 at the bottom of a page, then The Action on the next page.

5. It does not have "the smarts": for instance, if you chose say "welding"the program should suggest "welding helmet" and so on. It does not do this. Some might say the idea of this program is not the spitting out of a form, more the engagement of the person about to perform the task thinking about what he is doing.

All of the above limitations might be got around, but no gaurantees!

Everybody draws Handrails...don't they?

2009-04-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

Handrails....A necessary evil, as the fun of drawing them soon diminishes.
Unless you are the type of draftsman that finds them relaxing,because it is the ultimate in blame free drafting: How can you possibly get them wrong?
Over the years I have come across many different styles of handrails. Once I created a very badly written lisp to automatethe process. It only drew the railings as a 50 x 50 square, to save on computing horsepower- it was in 3D.

With me getting Autocad Architecture, I was in hog heaven, because it had a very smart
system for drawing handrailing. You just decided on a style, and picked a few points and there it was.
Unfortunately, I am back in the mechanical world of vanilla Autocad,and there don't appear to be any such items on it's horizon any time soon. Not that I draw handrails very often, so when I do it is not a big deal.

My original plan was to get all the ducks in a row on this one, and present about 4 different types of handrails as "ways" of doing them.

So far I have only got this drawing:

Please excuse the image quality-I originally posted this as a jpg, but when saving it back I noticed that the text was unreadable. Hence the png file above, which might work better.

If not, I'll post it on my site: http://bilrocad.com/ ....eventually!
It is for a food factory, so it is made from stainless steel. The good things about it are the lack of welding required and the ease of construction.The rails are just straight cut, and there is the theory that any sweeping to be done would just brushout through the 10mm gap in the kickplate.

The plan is you start sweeping at the top level and work your way down.
The bad thing is the little vee on the top of the stanchion, as this would snag sleeves and hands. It could be improved a lot by making the top rail continuous and not having the vee. This would mean that semicircular cuts would have to be made in the top of the stanchion, but with proper tooling, this might be a good thing.

I have a suspicion that this design has not been "engineered", so should not be trusted to conform to any standards.
This lack of "engineering" just highlights to me how bad a world standard is needed: We, as draftsmen or engineers, should never be choosing our own designs for such a mundane thing as a handrail. We could have a choice of very well engineered and thought out designs to choose from. For an engineer to be designing a handrail represents a waste of resources.
I hope to post further on this topic, with more designs and eventually putting on my website a series of drawings that could be used as a "semi-standard". I'm not an engineer, so these " semi-standards" would only be that.

Unless someone knows of a site that does?

Specs for a CAD computer

2009-03-18T01:48:00.000-07:00

I'm just trying to sort out a spec for a CAD computer.

At the moment I have an Intel Duo, about 18 months old, running Vista 32 bit, with 2 Gb of Ram and a Quadro FX1500 graphics card. I have a 20" main monitor and a 17" second monitor,both Philips. This setup seems to go well, I have the occassional crash, but who doesn't?

For normal computer users, a certain standard of computer is fine-all you need is about $NZ850, plus say $NZ200 for a monitor and you are done.

Just to add to the fun, the NZ dollar has depreciated against the US and Euro (it is about
NZ$1=US$0.53 at the moment.

I have priced up HP workstations-they seem to have quite a large range, it really comes down to how much money you are happy to pay in these recessionary times!

What I'd really like would be an Intel Xeon Quad core with a 24" main monitor/20"second monitor, high end graphics card, 64bit 6GB ram and so on. Hmm...just dreaming really....

Drawing a house automatically

2009-03-08T00:37:00.000-08:00

Drawing of a house using 3D solids in Autocad.

The files to enable this can be found at http://bilrocad.com/, under Architectural Lisps.

It is meant to be used by non-CAD persons such as architects.

For draftspersons receiving a hand-drawn item from an architect,it could be a quick way of getting this into Autocad.

Users should be aware that there are "better" ways of drawing a house.These ways are Autocad Architecture, or Autodesk Revit.

Unfortunately these cost money, and you may have only a copy of plain vanilla Autocad. If you have better than Autocad 2007, you will be able to make use of the section command to produce plan views of your 3D model.

The idea is that all houses can be represented by data, and that we can describe a house by how long each wall is, how many windows in that wall, and what sort.

It is in a trial state at the moment. The program works,but the quantity and quality of the windows available are low.You can check out what is available in the zip file, the contents of which should be placed in a directory called c:\bilro\house.
If enough people try it out and want it to come up to the next level,then I will produce some windows (for a small fee of course!).

The procedure is as follows:
1. Run the program, House.exe. It was made in Visual Basic 6.0, so does not need to be installed. All this does is ask a series of questions, then creates a text file based on the answers. It puts this text file in c:\bilro\House. So if this directory does not exist, you would need to create it. You have to start at the bottom left hand corner of the house and go anti-clockwise about it.

2. Open up the file using Notepad. It should look like this:
WALL

0
5000
90
2455
OUTERCORNER
1
W2 600 x 1200
600
1200
500
2000
WALL
0
6000
90
2455
OUTERCORNER
1
W2 600 x 1200
600
1200
1000
2000
ENDWALLS
Now the same thing but comments just for this instruction only-
WALL-so we know it is a wall
0-this is the orientation-ie 0= horizontal, 90=vertical etc
5000 -this is the length of the wall
90 -this is the thickness
2455 -this is the height
OUTERCORNER-this is how the end of the wall is
1 -number of openings
W2 600 x 1200-name of the block in the first opening
600 -window height
1200 -window width
500 -length from the start end
2000 -head height of the window
WALL-this is the next wall
and so on.....
6000 90 2455 OUTERCORNER 1 W2 600 x 1200 600 1200 1000 2000
ENDWALLS-just to let the program know its at the end!

3. Add c:\bilro\house to your autocad path (go Tools/options/files)

4. Rename the file to houseinfo.txt. Then load Ho.lsp into Autocad, type HO and then enter.

These instructions are included in the download zip file as a text file called How to Manual.txt
Please only use the available window blocks, otherwise autocad goes looking for things that are not there. If you open Drawing16, you will see an example of what is produced.

Efficiency and quality

2009-02-16T15:19:00.000-08:00

I was given a short job to do the other day. Just a flow diagram. I looked at it and said to myself that this should take 15 minutes. It took 45 minutes. I can only say in my defence there is a lot of typing in this drawing, and maybe I am a slower typist than I think.

Have a look, and if you feel keen, see if you can break the 45 minutes. I am sure some will do it in 15 minutes.

Which got me thinking: should I have used dtext instead of mtext? Is there a lisp routine around that draws boxes around text? Bet there is...

On another job, I received back from an outside firm some of my drawings, with corrections. It was a bit embarassing as they found all sorts of minor things like missing section titles and so on.

So all this comes down to:"How am I doing, quality-wise?" Answer: Could be better!

With 3D, it is all to easy to have dimensions/text in paper space that become unhinged when you are correcting the model. Maybe there could be a correction detector that operates within Autocad and points out the little disparities. At the moment, you might get on the command line a comment like "dimension disassociated".

Drawing a proposed cycle-way

2009-02-08T23:00:00.000-08:00

Here is my proposal for a bike cycle-way design.

On my various rides I have thought about various features a good design might have:

1. It must be as flat as possible, or going slightly down-hill if at all possible.

2. It must keep off the rain and sun, yet still offer the riders a view of some sort,as well as ventilation.

3. The route should be as direct as possible.

4. There should be enough width for 3 cyclists coming and 3 going. The reasoning behind this is that if you are cycling with a friend, you will need 2 spaces, and that leaves one space for quicker passing cyclists.

5. There should be a barrier, about 800mm high between the opposing flows of traffic.

6. If possible, it should look modern and elegant.

The upshot of all of the above, is a cycle-way that is about 6.3m wide, if weallow for 3m each side and say 100mm for walls and barrier.
One thing is that these would be made in a factory and it is probable the length would be limited to how much length the roads can take.I have guessed at 32m.

Other aspects of my design could be criticised:

1. 6.3m wide is quite wide: could this be cut back by having the other opposing traffic in its own span?

2. There is a privacy issue for people living beneath one of these things-It is possible there could be screens over the window openings.

3. Every 32m there would have to be a very solid tower to hold it all up. This tower would have to be capable of having a truck run into it, if it is anywhere near a road...which is likely.

All we need now is a concrete designer to work out the loadings!

Re Autocad R2010:after my last post, I checked out RobiNZ cad blog (see the link in the links part) and had a look at the official web launch demo. I think the 3D free form modelling seems to have a lot of good things going for it, and the demo shows off the parametrics quite well.

Autocad R2010.

2009-02-06T19:34:00.000-08:00

You can go to other places to find out which commands have been added and indepth analysis of all that is new with this. Here, you will only find my short take on what has been added.

Firstly, nothing dramatically new as far as I am concerned, because I am a 3D user. The only things I can think of as far as 3D is concerned, is that there has been a heavy effort on the part of the programmers to tighten up the display - ie when using 3d shading. The shading in previous versions has sometimes not looked the greatest, (it seems to vary from drawing to drawing), so this is most welcome, and is the part I look forward to most in the new release.

It seems a far more responsive program than before, but this is hard to judge as I've only tried it on an old Athlon 3500 with a cheap video card, on Windows XP. I'm curious as to how it goes on Vista.

For 2D users and new users the picture is different: A rearranged ribbon for commands, and for the first time, parametrics and constraints. Not to be left out, dynamic blocks have been revamped to make them easier to use.

Because the parametrics are only usable in 2d, I don't plan on using them. My work is so varied that dynamic blocks are not much use to me either.

Some 2D draftees will no doubt get excited by the parametrics. When I say 2d, this is not strictly true, as one enterprising person made two 3D blocks that each contained lines in them, and did a stunning animation of a rack and pinion.

There is a new file format, R2010.

Just in case you don't know what parametrics are, all it means is say you draw a rectangle and tell it that the two horizontal lines are always to be parallel (ie constrained) and the same for the two vertical ones, then if you stick one of the new special dimensions on the rectangle, then this gives you the ability to click on the constraint dimension and change it. This will cause the geometry to change. Quite a leap for Autocad, shame it is not available in 3D!

There is now the ability to bring a pdf file into your drawing. I have just tried this out and it is quite impressive for two reasons:
1. In a multipage file you are given the option of picking which one you need.
2. You can draw lines etc over the top of the pdf and it will snap to sensible parts of the pdf!

There are other items, such as measuring that have had an extreme makeover and I look forward to having these tools available. For instance there is now an area tool that highlights it's boundary so you can tell what is being measured. A small thing, to be sure, but if you add up all these small things, they start to add up to a compelling release.

Remember the fun of hatching using Autocad? There is now a new helper in your war: little red circles showing where the problem is. Again a small thing....but.

Express Tools now come ready installed on the menu bar, which by default is turned off!
If you want it back, there is a little down arrow next to the printer button.....this is the only thing you need to remember!

My New Website

2009-01-06T20:30:00.000-08:00

It has taken about 4 days of frustration,
but I now have a new website,
specifically for Autocad stuff.

It is http://bilrocad.com/

I consulted the webhosting reviews and the one that seemed to be the best was BlueHost. Their link is http://bluehost.com/
Time will tell. I suffered the pain that is HTML, but I much prefer that to ready made stuff where you are never quite certain as to what is going on. I had much fun with Filezilla doing the uploading. More a case of me not reading instructions carefully.

A few people wanted the piping routine, but as things go, inches got mixed up with millimetres, but I think the routines are ok now.
Tell me if they are not!

Lisp: Everyone draws pipes don't they?

2008-12-24T20:14:00.000-08:00

Of course they don't. I know that. Here is now made available, not exactly on a plate, a FREE, fun way to draw pipes. Not quite the end of drafting drudgery, but the start of the end!

Unfortunately, when I tried to put them on my blog all the lines ended up all over the place.

So I have made the decision to make the files available on a "request only" basis. That means you e-m-a-i-l me, asking for them, and I send them to you. (For free). I am trying to avoid the spammers here by saying think about blecouteur at xtra dot co dot nz.

In the process of testing: another snafu-the dialog box won't fit on the screen. This is because at work I have a big screen.....So I have now 2 dialog boxes to send you- one a chopped down one and one that is the full nine bananas. The small one does dairy pipes only-Grr...I will have to see about more columns...which can be done, it just makes life more complicated. It probably needs doing anyway. Try the full one called pipeset.dcl. if it does not work try the smaller one.

Every time I use this routine I am pleased at the appearance of pipes, as if by magic. There is a certain amount of ego stuff here, but I am at least honest enough to say that out there somewhere someone has done the same thing. (Probably a while ago.)

I had thought briefly of selling the combined routine, but they are very short routines, and any

capable lisp writer, if they had seen them being used, would be able to re-write them easily.

The idea is you run one routine initally to set the diameter of the pipe you want to be drawing.

The name of this routine is pipeset.lsp

Then you draw lines representing the pipe routes. Fiddle around with these to get them right.

Next, use pir.lsp to do the pipe radii. Unfortunately you have to do this elbow by elbow. One day I may make a routine to do this all in one hit.

Now comes the big moment: Set the routine pip.lsp onto that bunch of lines/arcs. That's right just select the damn lot all at once! Whoopee!....or it should be.

One of the routines uses a dialog box. This is contained in a separate file called a .dcl file.

The trick with this one is that the routine that accompanies it (pipeset.lsp), needs to know where you stuck it on your hard drive. You should be able to see the bit early on in the routine saying where the dialog file is kept.

Some people just get lazy and stick them all in the support directory, but this can be a pain if you upgrade.

Lisp, Using an incremental approach, and Variables

2008-12-22T00:18:00.000-08:00

The Development Approach
1. Start simple.

2. Test it.

Once you have one bit working, move on to the next bit.

Don't try to write the whole program all at once, all in one hit. You will make mistakes, and
these are quite tricky to find with Lisp.

Make your first lisp routine 3 or 4 lines if you can. Leave the handrail generator for when you have 3 weeks off.

Looking for help? Try going Tools/Autolisp/Visual Lisp Editor. Once the Editor is up you can hit help. Someone at Autodesk is a smart one, because he put all the lisp commands under an aphabetical listing in the help section. Which is good if you know the name of the command.

Basics of Variables
What is a variable? Just a name, that you have made up, and you assign a value to.
This value might change over usage.

For instance, consider:
(setq the_length 22)
The minute Autocad sees this it says "Aha! that variable the_length, it has an integer value of 22!" You may not know what an integer is. It is definitely nothing complicated, all it means
is it is a whole number. So for instance 22.23 would not be an integer.
Just a trap for young players here....do not use variables like angle or length. These are already
reserved for Autocad's own use and causes trouble if you do (Yes...I am guilty!)

How about:
(setq the_layer_name "Fred")
Here, the variable is being set to a string (whats a string?-just a bunch of characters)
You could change this in the course of the program by going:
(setq the_layer_name "Sam")

Naming of Variables
I'm afraid I have been a bad boy as far as consistency is concerned here: I seem to choose
whatever takes my fancy at the time. Sometimes I like running all the letters together, for
instance thelayername. Other times I go the_layer_name or TheLayerName.
Just remember lisp does not care about upper or lower case so just choose the system that
suits you best. But remember: One day you might have to read your own program back,
and having variables like "e" or "b" or "updown" won't make a lot of sense.

Get a peer review
At one stage I had written a 3d stair generator, which I was intensely proud of.
Until I gave it to a friend, who kindly pointed out that it did not compute the stairs he
thought it should be able to. He was right. I was wrong. But I went away and corrected
it and now it goes nicely. I hope to post this over the Xmas period, along with some other
ones.

There are good books out there, I bought one (Woops in 1992!) called Maximising Autolisp
by Rusty Gesner and Joseph Smith, and I have had good use out of it.

Autolisp

2008-12-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

This will be a short series of posts, concentrating on Autolisp routines that I have written.

I will attempt to provide routines that are heavily commented, so you can understand how they work.

My first point is that you do not have to be a genius to write lisp routines (?!) and that you can get quite a lot of satisfaction out of just a few lines of code.

It has been usable with every version of Autocad that I can remember, and one of it's chief advantages is that most routines will run on any version. Unlike visual basic for applications (VBA).

The implementation is easy and elegant: you get Notepad (have a look under Accessories on your Windows PC) up and running and start typing. To use, you can go "appload" in Autocad, but I prefer the lazy two screen approach: just drag and drop the file into autocad to load it.

Just remeber that file extension has to be lsp, so for instance it might be called cor.lsp.

This is a hangover from the MSDOS days and you may need to go to Windows Explorer and turn on the option that says "Hide file extensions for known file types" (Under Tools-Folder Options-View) . This is important because Notepad will save it's files with the extension .txt.

You will need to change that when saving, to .lsp.

Because blogspot don't allow file downloads, all routines will be shown in the blog post: you just cut and paste them into notepad.

One last "need to know": You need to create yet another file, always called acad.lsp.

This is a special file (again, just an easy text file) , that Autocad knows about and will check for.

If it finds it, it will load the routines listed in it so you have them all available at the command line when you need them.

Here is an example that you could cut and paste into Notepad, and, if you save it into

c:\program files\autocad\support directory (yours may vary slightly from this), it will make available the commands COR and IL. I use abbreviations to cut down the typing- COR stands for COPY AND ROTATE, and IL stands for ISOLATE LAYER. These are the two simple routines I am going to start you off on.

;--loaded functions

(defun C:cor () (load "c:/bilro/bilro1/cor")(c:cor))

(defun C:il () (load "c:/bilro/bilro2/il")(c:il))

What all the above stands for is that we are defining a function (hence defun) that can be used on the command line (hence the c:) and that part of this functions job is to load a lisp routine and make it available . It is a bit cryptic, but I find if you just follow this format, it always works.

Of course, all this loading is not much point if the routines cor and il don't exist at the path I have shown ie c:/bilro/bilro1/cor. Your path can be different-it does not matter where you keep them.

Setq - what does it mean? It just means "assign this to the said variable"

So, here is the code for COR.lsp:

;written by Bill LeCouteur-this line is just a comment -ignored by Autocad because of ";"

;this routine copies & rotates-this line is just a comment -ignored by Autocad because of ";"

(defun c:cor ()

(prompt "\nSelect the items to be copied and rotated: ")

(setq ss1 (ssget)) ;gets a selection set and sets it to a variable called ss1

(setq pt1 (getpoint "\nEnter rotation point for the picked items: ")) ;gets a user defined point

(command "copy" ss1 "" "0,0" "0,0") ; issues a standard autocad command-copy

(command "rotate" ss1 "" (list (car pt1) (cadr pt1)) pause); same again -pause is for user input

(command "redraw"); same again-standard command

(princ) ;exits cleanly

);this closes the parentheses at the start.

Here is the code for IL.lsp

;Program written by Bill Le Couteur

;Auckland NZ;

Rev 0 date 16.6.95;

This program isolates a layer by picking it

(defun c:IL()

(setq edata(entget(car(entsel)))) ;gets the user to select an item and sets the variable edata to it

(setq thelayer(cdr(assoc 8 edata))) ;finds out the layer it's from by looking at edata

(command "-layer" "s" thelayer "");sets the current layer to that layer

(command "-layer" "f" "*" "");freezes every other layer

(princ);exits cleanly

);end of defun

Whew! If you have got this far, you may have such enthusiasm that you might have actually attempted to do the above, so you may need help, so I have turned the comments on this blog to anyone can comment, and I will attempt to check this regularly and help if needed.

3D Drafting:My philosophy

2008-11-15T22:58:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I have come up with a style of drafting in Autocad that suits me.

These are for plant layouts.

See what you think of these:

1. Do not draw holes in pipe flanges. This uses up memory, slows down display and so on.
Having them in may make the view more realistic. For plant layouts, I would hope that nobody in the whole world puts in nuts and bolts on a pipe flange.

2. Where possible, simplify! There is a great temptation to draw every curve on an item-resist it.

3. Don't go Layer Mad. I reckon you need layers named:
Level 1 Plant
Level 2 Plant
Level 2 Beams
Level 2 Floor
Columns
Piping (Sometimes I use the pipe label from the p and id- eg Pipe-54-102-44)
....and not a lot more. I work with a person who had the idea that one should have a layer called say Sifter, as it allowed him to work on that item easily by isolating that item. I say, if you want to work on such an item for a while, you are better off cutting and pasting that item into a new drawing all by itself and working on it there. Alternatively, assign it a temporary layer. I use about 5 main layers:
Dim: This is for all annotation, not that this is needed much any more as most items in paper space can be any old layer.
CL: For centre lines
Hid: for hidden lines, not used much for 3d
lgt:for light lines
med:for medium lines
Hvy:for heavy lines
pha: for phantom lines.
Your ctb file should allow for all numbers from 8 to 249 to be 0.2mm wide and colour black when printing. Numbers 250 to 256 should be colour by object, not black, so that on a laser printer you can show shades of grey.
I use the built in Layer Manager to save various states, but I guess layer filters would have the same end result.

4. Do not draw the fillets in on the structural steel. This is wasteful of time, energy and clutters the drawing up, making it harder to determine what is where in wireframe.

5. Do not draw the insides of things, for example, hollow sections, unless you are really keen on portraying the "real thing". I worked for one company, where it seemed that it was a badge of honour to show all the insides of a hopper-who wants to know?! The answer is sometimes you do like to show this, but please do not blindly apply it to every item so you can say your drawings are consistent. If you are a cad manager reading this, you could in theory speed up the throughput of your office manyfold, if you considered just this point carefully.

6. Keep your model pure. By this I mean: don't put text in model space, or sectional views, or parts details. Put these in their own separate drawing files, it is not much trouble and keeps things fast and tidy.

7. Write block out your sections to file called say 149993-sectionAA.dwg. Then in the drawing that you want that section to appear, Xref it into that drawing. The benefit of this is that when you make a change in the model, you can update the section file, which will automatically update the drawing it appears in.

Happy drafting!

Rendering Using Autocad R2009

2008-10-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

Here is a render done using R2009. I'm quite happy with the quality-some may not be.
It was done using the Illuminated Sky Background option, which I'm finding makes life easy.

Rendering in Autocad R2009

2008-09-15T00:56:00.000-07:00

May as well put out a positive YES for R2009 here.

R2009 has improved rendering over R2008 : To get a good rendering now, just type in
LIGHTINGUNITS, set it to 2. Apply your materials-if you use realistic shading while doing so, then you get feedback that you have applied the materials.

Turn on Full shadows, then Sun and illumination-sky. You can use the visualising tab on the ribbon-just seems easier than fishing around in menus or typing.

Select the your geographical region, time of day etc and then press render, using say 640x480.

You should be pleasantly surprised. Ok, so not everyone is into rendering....but if enough users start out using the above approach, I would anticipate a huge increase in rendering.

I'm no expert in all this, but it seems to me that this business of "final gather" is involved.
Usually this is set to auto, and sometimes to get it kicked into life you need to set it to ON.

The thing about "final gather" is that, when it is enabled, all the shadows which used to be black, now look a lot more realistic.

Once you get a nicer rendering, save it as a tiff file, I find a resolution of 2400 x 1800 quite good for nice sharp pictures. They can take a while though-15 minutes is normal.

I hope to be able to post a typical rendering of mine soon.

Blocks versus Lisps

2008-09-04T00:28:00.000-07:00

Just plodding my way through one of my drawings today and a thought struck me: I've done this little thing before-a 75mm post with a plate on it's end and 2 x M12 bolt holes to fasten it to a nearby girt. (All in 3D of course)

In the past I have gone on about the need for blocks for every situation-but where does anyone get the time, or the inclination to be disciplined enough to organise a really comprehensive block library?

I am slightly organised now, and over the years the blocks have accumulated like dust in my computer. Maybe it is just that every situation appears to be unique, so things "need to be designed". This might be justifying our existence, or ego.

The other idea I had was that maybe someone (me? when I'm not busy???) would get on and write either in lisp or VBA, general types of lisps-for instance in the above example, you feel the need to do a plate on the end of a post: you initiate the routine and a dialog box comes up with all the variables, plus an option to auto-fill the variables. For instance you might choose a 75 square post: It would then offer up say 10mm as the plate thickness, and M12 as the bolt size and so on.

I'm not sure, but my gut feeling here is that a lisp routine would be better than a block, because the option would be there to change any of the variables before the thing is drawn.

Yet another thought:

Maybe this could all be accomplished using "styles" in the manner of Autocad Architecture: You might have a style named "Plate-75mm-M12" The idea is you insert an object that has all it's settings governed by the style. So when you want one that uses say M10, you saveas the old style then modify the new style to provide M10 holes. (Oops-sounds like redefining blocks!)

All this is most un-Inventorish! After all, what do we spend half our drafting life doing? Changing what is already there. Unfortunately, I would need vast quantities of cash and a promise of a long contract to get into the Inventor club. I was told once that Autocad is OK, but to be really serious, you need Inventor....Hmmmm.

One last gasp here: what if you could somehow link your drawing objects to say a Microsoft Access database? How would it work in practice? Maybe you are in the drawing, and someone says make the holes M10, not M12 in that plate. You issue a special command, click on the plate and you are immediately in the database, right where the plate is. You then alter the hole sizes in there and go back to the drawing, and update the drawing: It is done.

How the heck this would work, I don't know, but it does seem a bit complicated to actually get it to work.

I have already experimented with a house drawing program that uses a text file to generate a drawing of a house, using 3D solids. The plan was to get my drawing outline from the architect, feed all the info into a text file and then press a button. Only trouble was that there would have be a huge amount of work drawing most common types of windows. The idea worked, but I gave up drawing house plans.

R2009 Autocad and P and IDs

2008-07-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

Funny how things go....I was of the impression that R2009 was fairly crash prone. However, I have been using it now at NZSugar Ltd, where I am not attached to the network, and I have have had no crashes in the 3 weeks I have been there. (I was on a network on my previous assignment.)

Another factor may be that I have not done much in the way of 3D, stuck as I am doing the hot water P and ID. So Network? 3D?

In my way of doing P and IDs, I was asked if I could stick to NZSugar standard symbols for valves and so on. This I did do, and was able to add yet more symbols that they did not have.

The design and sizing of these symbols was a trick-do you make them fit on a grid? I have done P and IDs in the past and used the idea of using a grid but got sick of putting snaps on and off, not to mention that whenever you opened up someone elses drawing, they never used a grid.

The trouble is if you make your symbols too big, the drawings look wrong, and if they are too small, they are not legible.

I would be nice if, when I get the drawing with all the standard symbols on it, I could post it on this blog so others might use it. But I have not figured out how to put a download onto this blog.

Anyone have any ideas how?

Why I do not have an email address on my blog etc

2008-06-14T00:32:00.000-07:00

Hi Jim!
Sorry I have not replied-I have been busy with personal things as well as falling off my bike.
I have not posted my email address as I do not wish to be engulfed with spam. Which makes me think: how can I be contacted? I have thought of this idea....since robots are trolling for things with an ampersand in them, all I have to do is put my address in a blog posting like this one and make it look like this: blecouteur at xtra dot co dot nz.
Should be easy to figure out....

Now for the autocad stuff: I have been laid off from my job at Nucon Ltd, and have managed to land a short contract at NZ Sugar Ltd, who as it happens, do not want my computer connected to their network. You could almost hear my computer go:"What....there is no network? So I will go at almost twice the speed....". Well, maybe not twice, but it is very noticeable.

Which raises the interesting question: Is this R2009's fault, or is it the networks?

Arriving at NZSugar, I was surprised to find there was already a draftsman there (they went for quite a period with none). What was interesting about him was the fact that he was into VBA for Autocad in a big way and he had applied this all to electrical drawings.

Another interesting thing was that NZSugar had bought 6 seats of Cadopedia, an autocad clone.
The version they had though, could not read more than one layout tab. The other draftsman downloaded the latest version, and apparently it can.....

R2009 Autocad

2008-04-27T03:05:00.000-07:00

Oops! In a previous blog about R2009, I said the best thing about R2009 was that it drew blocks on the use of the soldraw command. This DID work in one of my drawings, but the other day I noticed it did not work in another. This is cause for some investigation on my part. I will keep you posted in case you do not have R2009.

It seems some people are having no problems at all with R2009, while others are complaining about some of the "features". For myself, I am perservering with it, as it may well be things like your video driver(is it up to date). I am using smpseesaw as a means of forcing acad onto one cpu (I have a dual cpu). I presume this makes a difference, but how much I am not sure.

It appears to be slightly weird that some have problems and some don't. I would like to know what the cause is. Any ideas, anyone?

How to get your co-workers frothing at the mouth....

2008-03-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've been doing this a while now for architectural stuff. I want a detail in my drawing: I drag the detail block in from explorer, and insert it in paper space, then scale it by 1:10 or whatever scale it is. Nice, neat, quick and no horsing around with viewports and model space.

I have run this technique past a couple of Cad monkeys and ......they are unanimous in their condemnation of me......how dare I insert geometry that is not 1:1?

In my defence, I claim any fool opening such a drawing will immediately see that this is indeed a block and it is in paperspace....so what is the big deal?

File management fun...not

2008-02-23T21:31:00.000-08:00

This post is just a warning to those of you out there that work on large projects, and there are frequent changes to files and revision files have to be kept. What a pain.

Where I work, we have all the drawings kept in a directory, and under that directory is a folder called Superceded. The plan is say you have a drawing called 5046034.dwg and it becomes rev A, you copy the original to Superceded and then rename it to 5046034A.dwg.

Well, somewhere in the piece I was renaming and renumbering files, and I used the "drag and drop" technique. It appears this works fine on c: drive but not on a network drive, as the dragged files suddenly reappeared in the next session. Needless to say, the engineer was very confused and upset!

Moral of the story? DONT USE DRAG AND DROP ON A NETWORK DRIVE!

File Management

The standard way the firm has kept files in the past has been to chuck em all in one honkin' great directory and call them things like: 5046032.dwg

So.....you want to find something? You have to have a good memory, or you make a temporary Excel or Access file. Some of our projects might have as much as 500 drawings in one directory.

Which is OK except that you are now typing out the title block all over again....which seems inefficient.

After all the shouting is over these all get put into a program called EDMS, which is nice, but who wants to manually key in all that stuff? Not me, said the draftsman!

I had encountered another firm, where some bright spark decided to give a name to the drawing file, for instance 5046-032 Sugar Surge Hopper G.A.dwg.

I thought this was a much better idea, and adopted it, even if it did mean that I had to type the title twice. I can even admit to it's major drawback, that it does use up space in the file open dialog box.

It does have one advantage: You can use a dos batch file to extract all the file names to a text file, then they can be further carried to Excel and or Access. I call mine getem.bat---all it has is one line

DIR/B/X > THELIST.TXT

It outputs the listing of the files to a file called "thelist.txt".

I would imagine there are people out there using Autocad's data extraction techniques to populate databases with things like drawing no and title.

Ahhh.....but I don't use that File Open Dialog--I use a permanently open Windows Explorer to open my drawings from.

Another refinement I tried to introduce was putting different groupings of drawings into different folders. For instance all Layouts would have their own folders. Each grouping of plant would have its special folders. We did try, but this was "not the way we have always done it..."

Revisions

Ahh....revisions....don't you just love them? Whoever wanted these, was mired in the good old days of manual drafting. There is just one big problem: Now we work on 3D models, the concept of revisions is almost unmanageable.

Someone I know says the people he deals with have actually given up on revisions. Which if you think about it is not such a bad idea. After all, all you are trying to do is provide a snapshot of the drawing at a particular time. What is wrong with (say) if you change something, take a PDF of the drawing, and save it somewhere, with the date printed on it?

Maybe the drawing should be considered a moving target until the magic "Issued for Construction" stamp gets put on?

Autocad R2009

2008-02-23T14:09:00.000-08:00

R2009 Autocad.

In a nutshell as far as I can see, it has a few killer features:

1. The ability to have a permanently open layer dialog box. Only useful for some.

2. Click on something, and a properties box comes up. This is a bit disconcerting at first, but I predict some will just love this one. You can choose what properties will normally appear.

3. This is the absolute most wonderful item: Soldraw now does its thing on BLOCKS!(same with the section tool)

4. There are preview gadgets for drawing files and layouts, which in time may become a more useful feature, once we all get used to them.

5. The ribbon. I know I have raved on about going to keyboard entry, but my natural laziness has prompted me to use the ribbon. The reason is I have 2 screens and this really is a replacement for the Dashboard, which I have been using.

6. There are some 3D visualisation tools that may grow on me.

So there you go:
It looks prettier than R2008. Not a big consideration for some, but we spend 7-9 hours a day looking at it.....

It also allows me in my daily work to do a section on a set of solids, some of which might be a block, and have them appear....which would be worth the cost of the upgrade.

New Personal Blog

2008-02-18T22:52:00.000-08:00

I have now realised the error of my ways. What started out as an Autocad blog has now ended up a personal photo gallery.

SO........I have now got a new blog, just for the personal stuff. It can be found at

http://williamlecouteursblog.blogspot.com/

What with all my building work at weekends and a weeks holiday, I have not had much time to rave on to the (it appears) two or three visitors I do have. (Or are they just web bots trawling?????)

Not Autocad...just Bill creating a heart attack for himself...

2008-01-01T23:20:00.000-08:00

These pics explain why I have been very quiet. It is because I have been very busy. Just a 2 day job to add on a sunroom to the front of the house. (Day 7 and counting!) Thank god for Robbie helping me as I can imagine the whole thing going horribly wrong. Anyway the pics tell a thousand words, so here they are: These 2 - a door and a window took all day.....

This is Robbie...early in the day....

Hmm--just about finished....think not..

There seem to be all sorts of wrinkles, like how come cedar weather boards cost $27/metre?

The user interface for Autocad

2007-12-24T13:02:00.000-08:00

Over the years of using Autocad, I have often found that I have gone for the easy way out. I refer of course to the ability to have toolbars, tool palletes and so on.

These are fine, but tend to gobble up screen real estate, hence my use of a dual monitor setup. Even then, this gets to be a long travel for the mouse, so the view toolbar ends up on the main monitor along with the ucs on etc.
Not smart, which is why I have a 20" monitor.

Other draftees I know have a minimalist approach and have NO toolbars ever and regard me as a slightly mad person.....So maybe this year it is time to change my approach and have a humdinger of a pgp file going.

Which makes me think: how is the best way to do this? I had come across one guy who was left handed. He had a clever plan: every command was assigned a number. This meant he could rest his right hand on the keypad, and hold onto the mouse with his left hand. Seemed pretty clever. Unfortunately I am right handed so nuts to that one. He must have had a good memory!

My coworker uses a keyboard for all commands and has remapped things so that where his left hand rests on the keyboard is where all the common commands are kept--ie something like "a" for "zoom".

Maybe I could use a similar idea--left hand is the one only on the keyboard, and somehow remap the enter key onto the caps lock key. Then all the main keys would be qwert, asdfg, zxcvb. Which gives only 15 commands--obviously not enough. Doubling up could give 15 x 15= 225 enough? ie qw qe qr and so on-- But how to remember all this...ouch.

Would this setup cause RSI-I do not know....

I thought 225 would be fine---that may be ok because some commands are so obscure they are never used---I had a quick check of the standard pgp file- it is about 350 commands.

It would be nice if Autodesk has ever figured out which commands are the most common--ie what are the top 15 and so on.

These would be my most used 15 commands: line, circle, dtext, arc, move, copy, stretch, explode, block, wblock, edit text, dimension, leader dimension, layer, rectangle.

Then I could have the fun of struggling to remember all this for the first 2 weeks back at work. Must be mad.

Standard Parts...will the madness end?

2007-12-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

Well, the poor person that seems to be visiting this site has motivated me into another rave. (Thanks Robin!)

Regarding the madness, I predict the employers out there will finally figure out that us draftsmen have been subject to Parkinson's law to increase our working life.

It is like this: somewhere in Poland some draftsman is drawing a footplate for the platform he is going to draw. He will lovingly draw a rectangle, then the circles that represent holes in said footplate, etc etc. At the same time in Germany another draftsman is drawing the identical item....Hmmm.

You have to admit: this is MADNESS. (sorry to shout!)

And don't hand me any crap about local standards and so on....surely a footplate is of a certain rating or it is not?

Why can there not be a WORLD standard of certain items that are of such plain manufacture, there could be a set of drawings that everyone could refer to?

I even have a part number/drawing number system to start it off: In the case of the said footplate, say it is for a 100mm square post and going onto a concrete floor, it could have a part number of:
FOOTPLATE-100POST-200-110-10-2HOLE-14-A
Which would mean: Footplate for a 100 post, size 200 x 110 x 10 thick, 2 holes which are 14 dia and the A on the end would represent the issue number (in case the standard needs changing).
This way of doing part numbers is not my idea- it is used by companies such as SMC to define part numbers.

I have tried to get my current employer to adopt such a system, but alas, my powers of persuasion are not strong. Seems like a no-brainer to me....

More on the Zero Text Height Saga..

2007-10-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

There is obviously more to this than meets the eye....If you insert a drawing into another drawing that has a STANDARD dimstyle, apparently it changes that drawings settings. This has to be a good reason not to use this style at all. Maybe you need one that is unique to yourself-that way you would always be sure it would not get messed up.

I also neglected to say that my example is METRIC - ie 3 means 3mm which is 1/8 ".

The use of annotation scale adds another layer of complexity to it all.
Maybe I should retire now before it becomes all too hard!

Zero Height Text

2007-10-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

Formatting default text in autocad is easy: You go format, then text. Choose your style name and font.

Now comes the funny part: if you leave the height of the text at 0, then when you issue the text command, it asks
you what you want the height to be. If you chose acadiso.dwg as your starting drawing, then this comes up with a
default of 2.5mm. Fine. The you are asked for the rotation. Ok. Then you key in the text.

This is the default (I believe) of Autocad, and as such, 99% of users go down this road.

If you now go and place a dimension, it will default at a dimscale of 1. Then if you type dimscale and set it to say 5,
and update that dimension, it scales both the text and arrowheads and so on to be bigger. Thats OK.

Many years ago, I obviously did not go down this track. I made the mistake(?) of setting my text height to a value-
for instance if my drawing was to be plotted at 1:1, I made it 3. For 1:5 I made it 3x5=15. I used lisp routines to accomplish this and all was well. To get my dimensions to scale nicely at the same time, I used a lisp routine to do this as well.
This worked well, and I drafted on. Then other people had to use my drawings. Oops...big problems....when they dragged a dimension
it would suddenly develop bigger text.

So, after hours of puzzlement, I came to realise that there was something wrong, and I tracked it down to the fact that zero height text should always be used. Then I came upon a system variable called textsize.

Talk about confusing....but all it means is that the default text height is controlled by this variable.

I quite liked my old way, as I could just go text and pick a point and start typing (2 keystrokes avoided!). I will most likely now go out of my way to redo the text commands to get rid of this annoying default behaviour.

I had put dimensions on someone elses drawings recently, and found they had about 5 dimension styles on the go,
and I was not particularly keen on any of them.

So in the end I redeveloped my lisp routine for setting drawing scale, and offer them here.

The idea is you run skn.lsp, which sets the style to STANDARD (every drg has a style called that) and massages the variables
to be correct(?!). After that you purge all the old ones out. Then you use DS.lsp to set the dimscale and text.(It is shorter)
;This routine sets up for dims and text
;By Bill Le Couteur

(defun c:SKN(/ texht skale lnscale)
(setvar "cmdecho" 0)
(command "-dimstyle" "r" "STANDARD")
(setq skale (getreal "Please enter the plotted scale: "))
;(setq skale 0.1)
(setq texht (* skale 3))
(setvar "lunits" 2)
(setvar "luprec" 2)
(setvar "auprec" 2)
(setvar "coords" 2)
(setvar "ltscale" 4)
(setvar "psltscale" 1)
(setvar "mirrtext" 0)
(setvar "pdmode" 0)
(setvar "pdsize" -2.0)
(setvar "sketchinc" 0.5)
(setvar "skpoly" 1)
(setvar "snapunit" (list 10 10))
(setvar "tracewid" 1.0)
(command "viewres" "" 20000)
(command "units" "2" "1" "1" "2" "0" "n")
(setvar "dimaltd" 4)
(setvar "dimaltf" 0.03937)
(setvar "dimassoc" 2)
(setvar "dimasz" 2.0)
(command "dimcen" "2" "dimclrd" "256" "dimclre" "256"
"dimclrt" "2" "dimdle" "0.0" "dimdli" "6.0"
"dimlunit" "2" "dimalt" "0"
"dimexe" "1.0" "dimexo" "1.0" "dimgap" "1.0"
"dimlfac" "1" "dimscale" skale "dimsoxd" "0"
"dimtih" "0" "dimtix" "0"
"dimtofl" "1" "dimtoh" "0" "dimtsz" "0.0"
"dimtvp" "1.0" "dimzin" "8" "dimtxt" "3"
"dimtxsty" "STANDARD" "dimtad" "1"
"dimdec" "0" "dimrnd" "1" "dimdsep" "." "dimpost" "." "dimfit" "3")

(command "-style" "STANDARD" "ROMANS.SHX"
"0" "1" "0" "" "" "")
(setvar "textSIZE" TEXHT)
(command "-dimstyle" "S" "STANDARD" "Y")

(prompt "Drawing scaling successfully reset to: ")

(princ (getvar "dimscale"))

(setvar "cmdecho" 1)
(princ)
)

;This routine sets up for dims and text
;By Bill Le Couteur

(defun c:DS()
(setq skale (getreal "Please enter the plotted scale: "))
(setvar "DIMSCALE" SKALE)
(setq the_textsize (* skale 3))
(setvar "textsize" the_textsize)
(princ)
)

2007-09-29T18:06:00.000-07:00

What the heck is this doing on a CAD blog....well I needed some time off, so took my wife on holiday to the South Island of New Zealand.

We had a great time! Rose’s first time in the South Island, and she was impressed.

Here is where we went, just in case you might go down there sometime.

We landed in Christchurch and stayed in the Millenium Hotel right in the centre of town (expensive, but nice).

Next day we did the big haul from Christchurch to Dunedin. In hindsight this should be a two day trip.

The scenery was nothing particularly spectacular, pretty flat. Hunting about for a motel in Dunedin we came upon “The Esplanade”,
a motel right on the beach front at St Clair. Wonderful---went to sleep to the sound of the waves.

Next day was a fairly easy run to Brian and Joan Brenssell’s farm near Tapanui in West Otago. We only meant to stop for a cup of tea and ended up staying two nights. (Joan is my cousin) Rose really enjoyed herself there, feeding lambs and generally not doing much. Bill tried to fix Brian’s computer...enough said about that. (Sorry Brian!)

Off the Wanaka via Queenstown—felt like a tourist trap. Next morning a wonderful ride to Haast through the Haast Pass and on to Franz Josef Glacier. Again, a tourist place but great views of mountains etc.

Feeling tired, we decided to stop for two days as we were starting to fade.
A good decision, as we found out it is not a 10 minute walk to the Glacier. It said 30 minutes, which was correct, but left you looking over a rope barrier at the glacier about 2 km away.

As everyone else seemed to be going over the rock strewn area in front of the glacier, we decided to climb over the rope as well.
The water falls near to the face were neat, but I never did get right up to the ice face. Next time.

There is a beach nearby at Okarito. Bill decided he thought a swim was in order and as no one seemed to be around took a chance.
He had just got out when a four wheel drive came around the corner. The male driver (no passengers) just smiled.

Then another long drive, from Franz to Christchurch. This is not a good idea – it is too far. Better to have stopped at Hokitika.

That said, it was another drive through what would have to be one of the most scenic bits of NZ.

The last port of call was Akaroa, just out of Christchurch.

September 9, 2007

2007-09-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

Where do I start? Is there a target audience? I would hope my target audience would be interested in things to do with drafting and usage of Autocad. At present I am working for a large by NZ standards company as a contract draftsman, so I guess I should be circumspect about what I do say.

These last two years have seen a quantum leap in Autocad. With R2007 we have been delivered such wonderful goodies as presspull, sweeps and lofting. Not to mention such things as Section Tool and Flatshot.

I have been given the chance to draw a part of large food processing plant upgrade. To this end I have employed Autocad in 3D.

Because it is such a large model, I have split it into several models and then Xreffed these smaller ones into one overall "Big Momma". Luckily, I have bought a "New" computer ---not the hottest and bestest, more a middle of the road one---Core Duo-the top end one and a FX1500 Quaddro card. I am quite happy with this combination....but it always could be faster!

My technique for attacking the sections of the various models has been to
use the section tool and write block out the sections to a file of their own, eg called SectionAABagFiller.dwg. Then I create an "empty" drawing -ie just a title block saved as say 5046-112 Sections.dwg. In this drawing I xref in the section view just created, and then put on my annotation in model space. This one file may have many tabs on it and xref in several sections.

The huge advantage this technique gives, is only apparent when there are changes (The one thing a draftee can ONLY be sure of!).

If there are, you change the model, then regenerate the sections. Voila! All the sections in the sections drawing are updated automatically.

I cannot claim this as my own idea, as Autocad Architecture uses a similar system. (Not quite the same)

No doubt whoever is reading this knows that all draftees have their own funny ways of doing things. Seems I am no different, as there will be those out there that use 3DClip to achieve their automatic updates.

My feeling is now that the sectioning tool produces clearer sections.

I guess it all comes back to the problem: Is is necessary to produce something that can be admired for its graphic style, or is it better to just use the cheapest, easiest fastest method? (As long as the drawing can be understood)

In the past, I have probably steered towards the cheap and easy. Now retirement is on the horizon, I finding myself veering towards the "better looking is better" idea.