HP Grows Designjet T-series

Someone indicated I should post more often. I suspect they where looking for posts less about products and more about Civil 3D. This is a product post. HP recently announced a new product in their large format printers, the HP Designjet T2500. The printer also comes with a fancy term to describe what it does, it is a eMultifunction Printer (eMFP).

HP has produced a slick promotional video showing all of the input they received from users in designing the product.

In addition to getting user input in the design the printer includes a scanner, software to share drawings with others outside the physical location of the printer. I always hated when paper came out in a big mess if the output wasn’t minded periodically. This printer includes an integrated output tray to help collect the results of using the printer.

At $9,895 the printer is targeting the medium to enterprise (fancy word for larger company) companies. That’s way too much machine for me, so don’t expect to see one of these in my office any time soon. You might work for a larger group and might find this product fits your needs.

Dell Precision Workstations

It looks like I’m picking up speed on my blog posts, two in two days!

Dell announced new version of their desktop and laptop workstations. Since my primary machine is a laptop, I’m going to focus on the new laptop features. One new feature available for the new products is an available WiGig wireless docking station. this means you no longer have to have a physical connection to a docking station to connect to a monitor, external hard drive, mouse, and/ or keyboard. The laptop needs to be two to six feet from the docking station and the laptop will automagically connect to the docking station and connecting the associated peripherals. Since I typically work in a non-traditional workspace, this would be great for me.

Another feature is an optional 10-finger Wacom multi-touch on the 17.3 inch display. I have no idea what it does, but it sounds really cool. Unfortunately I slept through my briefing time period due to a late night work session. Since I didn’t start writing this article until yesterday I didn’t get a chance to ask a question on what exactly it does. I did read that Dana Probert uses a Wacom, but I’m not sure what use it has for Civil 3D. Most articles I’ve searched on the topic don’t do a good job explaining what it does. They do make general statements that is available, so I guess I have the same understanding as those authors.

The workstation boast the availability of four hard drives, although only three of them are the standard 2.5” hard drive docs. The fourth is a mini hard drive. Doing Software development I have a large need for hard drive space. The huge install space required for the virtual machines along with the large install space requirements for Civil 3D makes a lot of hard drive space a requirement for any machine I’ll purchase in the future. Although my computer still has a year of warranty left on my Dell Precision workstation.

For more information check out Dell’s Workstation page.

Section Labels

Often times we need to show section labels on the plans. I recently came across a great idea on how to show them. In the image below you can see Section A-A indicated in plan view. The section line shown below is an alignment with begin and ending station labels as the arrows and A. Adjusting the alignment automatically moves the A callouts as well as updating the profile I’m using to represent the section.

If you wanted the section to be offset from the alignment as simple line label anchored to the start and end of the alignment, with an offset value. The alignment would then need to be set to not plot to complete the look.

I got this great idea from John Mayo, PE. A fellow Autodesk Expert Elite.

This makes a whopping 20 posts for the year, should I post more often?

English Text in Reports

I probably should write this in multiple languages, but much like Autodesk screw the rest of the world! You all should be speaking English. England made us do it, well actually we Americans did it ourselves rejecting French, German, numerous native American languages, and other immigrant languages.

You may have noticed that some of the XML reports have english words in them. To get rid of them open this file in your favorite text editor:

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2012\enu\Data\Reports\xsl\header.xsl

Make sure to replace the Civil 3D version year with the one you are using. Then find the words you want to change. This will only change the header files, you would need to go in and modify the other xsl files to change all of them.

Infrastructure Competition

Autodesk is sponsoring the 2nd annual Excellence in Infrastructure Competition, entries due by June 28.   More than $10,000 in prizes will be awarded. Autodesk indicates the competition is open to everyone planning, designing, building and managing infrastructure projects, 21 years and older, to highlight the best projects done in 2012/2013, although I suspect some countries may be excluded from this competition. One that comes to mind is Cuba.

Autodesk is looking for the best usage of Autodesk technology to plan, design, build or manage Civil Infrastructure projects. Project types may include Transportation (roads and highways, rail, airports, bridges, etc.), Land development (commercial sites, subdivisions, public parks and recreation…), Water (distribution, water resources, dams and levees, wastewater), Energy (electric and gas distribution, electric transmission and substation design) and Urban planning.

Autodesk is also looking for visualization of infrastructure projects.  So even if you only used Autodesk technology for the visualization of the project such as -  design concepts for stakeholder reviews (Autodesk InfraWorks); constructability reviews and scheduling ( Autodesk Navisworks); or creating near photorealistic renderings (Autodesk 3ds Max) – they want those submissions too!

Visit http://www.infrastructure-excellence.com/ for more information.

(Much of this post is plagiarized from a PR email, with the pronouns changed along with some word changes.)

(Much of this post was written while waiting for glacially slow Civil 3D to open a large project drawing. So you should have time to enter the competition while waiting for Civil 3D to open your submitted projects.)