Dead Blog?

Why is this blog seemingly dead? Part of the reason is me being busy travelling the State of California teaching a bunch. The other part is me boycotting the main source of topics of this blog, the Autodesk Forums. Autodesk decided to redo the their forums. In doing so it has made it more difficult to post and reply. They added a ton of white space (which on some pages has been reduced), put a bunch of meaningless text and other input boxes between the Enter Details and the Post button. My goal is to type an answer, press Post and move on to my next task. Currently I have to type and then scroll down to press Post. Heaven forbid you scroll down too far and accidently press the Reply button.

So until Autodesk adds a Post button below the Enter Details box, I plan to continue my boycott of the Forums. Until then I foresee this blog to be devoid of content.

Notes on Starting Out Programming

It's mainly about having a problem to solve and then taking the steps to accomplish the task. I am usually just taking the workflow that one would be doing in AutoCAD and automating it. Google and Bing are a great source to find code snippets that can be modified to suit the needs of the code.

Getting started for an Autodesk project is covered in this AKN:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/simplecontent/content/my-first-autocad-plug-overview.html

Creating a bundle file to autoload in AutoCAD:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/search-result/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/AutoCAD-Customization/files/GUID-40F5E92C-37D8-4D54-9497-CD9F0659F9BB-htm.html

This book helps teach how to better organize code:

https://martinfowler.com/books/refactoring.html

The source code for the free version of the SincPac is a great resource for Civil 3D coding:

http://www.quuxsoft.com/SincpacC3D_source.aspx

Just a Random Thought

Why spend so much time renaming modeling? Seems a better use of time would be to create great tools that users would want to use. Why would I want to use products that need to win a Dundie type award to stand out?

Curb Return Design - Plane Method

This is in response to @jwilkerson post from years ago, found in this post:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-land-desktop-read-only/ot-curb-return-design-plane-method/m-p/1369924

The referenced formula is here:

http://rctlma.org/Portals/7/documents/pamphlets/plan_check_curb_return_design.pdf ArchiveLink

Not sure what the error he was referencing. It looks like the G2 arrow shown in the image is going in the wrong direction. I think it should be going from PI1 to B direction for the flow of water. It looks like they corrected the error in the PI3 by having the formula reverse the G2 slope. Here is a link to an Excel spreadsheet and a link to a drawing showing a plane solution that checks the values via a model. Both the drawing and Excel spreadsheet should be checked for correctness. It is provided only as a reminder to myself, since I’ve created this Excel spreadsheet before and forgot where I put it. Hopefully Google will find it next time I’m looking for it.

County or Riverside PLANE METHOD CURB RETURN DESIGN.

Surveying Related Ideas

Often times we need to create rectangles to represent existing features that look like rectangles.  To save time surveyors will shoot two points and then in the office convert those two points into rectangles. With lisp we can automate the rectangle creation down to picking two clicked points.

• This forum post has some lisp code that does just that. Here is a link to a text file with the code extracted in case the forum post goes down.
• To run the lisp save it to a text file with the extension of .lsp
• Type Appload at the command line.
• If you want to run it once, select the file from the upper portion of the Appload dialog box.
• If you want the lisp to load everytime AutoCAD is run, then add the lisp file to the Startup Suite.

A second desired workflow is to create a point at the intersection of two selected objects, the objects don’t have to intersect. The objects may be arc, line, polyline, lot line, or feature line.

To start open the Point Create Creation Tools.

Then under the second drop down choose the Object/Object option.

Then follow the prompts. This will create a point where the objects intersect. If you want to remove any of the prompts you can change the settings of the Point Creation command using the double down arrow on the right of the Create Points toolbar.