Now Anyone can draw handrails

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?

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

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....

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

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...

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....

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.