Help! about Timer.

Hello everyone!

I`m a Chinese student,and I like grasshopper very much!

Now,l have a question during my grasshopper study:

How to use the Timer？Maybe I need an example to know it.

Thanks!

Attachments:

EP20.jpg, 9 KB

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 8, 2009 at 6:06am

Hi Skywoolf,

why do you think you need the timer?

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by skywoolf on November 8, 2009 at 6:23am

Hi David,

I`m not sure,perhaps out of curiosity.

My friend want to make a Video by grasshopper.

we think the timer will be helpful.

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Permalink Reply by ZIE LIU on August 25, 2011 at 8:09am

hi sky...good to see you in an old document in grasshopper forum...

haha...

know you for a long time when i started learning GH last year...

your work is impressive in the Chinese forum...

do you have twitter or msn or gmail so i could follow you...

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Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on November 8, 2009 at 6:45am

Hi David, (or Giulio if you look in on this)

While we're talking about the Timer component I don't seem to be able to get Giulio Piacentino 's render animation definition to work as its meant to. I just get null values from the component that the timer is tied to and the arrow of the timer is red does this indicate that its working or not working. I've made sure that the global abort is free for timers but nothing is happening?

Best regards,
Danny

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Permalink Reply by Giulio Piacentino on November 9, 2009 at 10:52am

Hi Danny,
could you have a look if this definition is working for you?
It is meant to work with Grasshopper version 0.6.0019. To check if you have it, click on Help -> About. If it still does not work, could you please send me your Grasshopper log after opening the definition (send to the email address below)? For that, click on View -> Event Log -> Save As...

- Giulio
______________
giulio@mcneel.com - Barcelona

Attachments:

animation-example-19.ghx, 218 KB

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Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on November 9, 2009 at 3:00pm

Thanks for this I think I have identified the problem, I'm currently using a pre-release version of GH for testing 0.6.00030 and there does not seem to be an EH_OGLShader

21:47:58 (+270ms): Error: The type or namespace name 'EH_OGLShader' does not exist in the namespace 'Grasshopper.Kernel.Types' (are you missing an assembly reference?) (line 113)

I'll email the file when I get to work tomorrow if it helps.

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 9, 2009 at 4:05pm

Danny, all classes have been renamed from EH_ to GH_ prefix.

EH = ExplicitHistory; GH = GrassHopper.

If you rename those in the script it might work again.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by Hui Chen on November 8, 2009 at 7:05am

If we can use timer to make something run itself along a circle?(without using sliders)

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 8, 2009 at 7:47am

You can use the timer to periodically expire a single object. The timer frequency does not represent that actual time between ticks, but rather the idle time between the completion of one solution and the start of the next. So, typically the actual tick frequency is the timer frequency plus the time it takes to recompute the solution.

Timers are used mostly to read out serial port data or to parse textfiles.

You can use the timer to get the current system time, which could be used to animate something without use of sliders.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

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Permalink Reply by Hui Chen on November 9, 2009 at 10:05am

I beg your helping please,david,my hero.How can I make the Z value of a point increase 1.0 every second,using Timer.I've failed so many times.

By the way,I and my friends are now translating into Chinese,We've already get to 7.8,maybe we'll need your help after a few weeks. ^_^!

--
Chen Hui

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Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 9, 2009 at 1:05pm

Using a timer itself will not get you there. If you want to change some data every interval, then use that new data fot the next iteration, you either have to find a way to store that data outside the Grasshopper data structures, or you have to somehow link the time variable to the data.

Solutions:

1) Store the point as a static variable inside a Script component., then increase whenever the RunScript function is called.

2) write the data to a file, then read that same file on the next iteration, move the point, overwrite the file again.

3) Use a Script component to extract the total number of seconds that have passed since time T, then feed that number info the point component.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia