Remote Controls for Grasshopper

Ever since we built the bowl generator with what seems like a million controls, I have been looking for a way to build remote controls outside of Rhino and be able to feed inputs into Grasshopper. The best solution I have found is to build a control panel with PyQT and save the inputs as a JSON file. A python grasshopper script checks for updates on this file and coverts the JSON data to usable inputs.

Watch the remote controller in action.

The panel is built with PyQT and then compiled with Py2EXE which gathers all the necessary libraries and compiles the python script into an EXE. This makes the panel usable on any machine regardless of whether they have Python or PyQT installed or not.

If there is any interest, I may develop a series of tutorials that teaches how to create the panels, and use them with Grasshopper.

You can read more and download the files (7 Mb, which is over the 5 Mb limit) here.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rémy Maurcot on March 20, 2013 at 8:53am

Good job Ryan,

This is much like my work RhinoBridges interface.

I'll watch in detail your work, yet bravo.

Permalink Reply by Ryan Gathmann on March 20, 2013 at 8:58am

That's cool, I have not seen Rhino Bridges before. I trying to figure out a simple way to let build custom controls, which out having to write all the code for them. I will keep everyone informed.

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