A search for an Autocad Viewer

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?

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

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

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....

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?

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.

Filleting Polylines

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!