Video Postings

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!

Want to draw wooden windows then?

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

Maybe it's time for a break..

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

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

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.