ructural member. It can only be used as a Veneer / Cladding. You may observe from my sketch that structural member is only a timber frame. Hence we do not need to have a valid bond as long as the brick veneer is tied together with each other and to the timber structural frame behind.
Nevertheless, though i understood the components used in the definition, i only partially understood the logic behind your definition i.e. only until 'Divide Dist' and Extracting the points. After that I did not understand the logic behind using
a) Extracting 40 random values and than using those values as input for Seed to extract another set of 40 random values.
b) Extracting list length, subtracting with random values created in (a) above and then dividing with number 3.
c) Duplicating the Datas
d) The most perplexing is using above logic (a,b,c) to to extract number of branches (number-40) by using Tree Statistics. If number 40 is the input we required for 3rd Random component Why couldn't we connect the List Lenght to Pramviewer and extract the number of branches (40) and connect the output to the Random Component?
e) Finally i did understand the logic behind creating 2 Vector to create the bricks. But i did not understand the addition following the vector.
f) Why do you use the function 'simplify'? - what does it do? I know it simplifies the data tree, but what does simplifying a a data tree do to the entire definition?
Hannes, i know this is quite comprehensive list of doubt, but your help is and will be always appreciated.
Cheers
AB
…
ails.
Some word about the mesh... (see Image_01)
I took a flat 4 points NURBS surface as imput (very easy, it defines the total area of my pavilion) and some points (that defines the contact with the ground).
Then I extracted a grid of points from the NURBS (Surface_Util_Divide surface) and compared 'em with the contol points, in order to associate to each grid's point its own attractor (Vector_Point_Closest Point).
Than I moved the points down. I used the distance from each point to its attractor (inverted) as amplitude for the vector of the movement, in order to say: the nearer you are to the control point, the more intense your movement will be. During this operation I've passed the distances' data list into a graph mapper (Params_Special_Graph Mapper), in order to regulate in a very intuitive and interactive way the shaping of my canopy.
At the end of the process I asked GH for a simple Delaunay mesh (Mesh_Triangulation_Delaunay Mesh). It's a very cool command, I believe!!!
Ok, now some word about the component, it's design and it's repetition/adaptation to the mesh...
(see Image_02)
I took the mesh and extracted components on first and faces's information on second. Then I selected and separated the vertexes (1°, 2°, 3°) of each triangular face into threee well defined list.
Then I re-created the triangles' edges. Please pay attention because it's not the same if you use output information from Delaunay components, because here we need a justapposition of edges where triangles touches each others.
After this work I joined the edges and found their centroid. At the same time I found the mid point of each edge.
Now the component... (see Image_03)
It' a little bit longer to describe: I'll try to be synthetic.
Substantially it is a loft from a curve to a point, repeated three times for each triangle (Surface_Freeform_Extrude Point). The point is an elevation of the centroid of the triangle (you can choose if the exstrusion has a single height or it's related to an attractor. In my case it was fixed). The curve is combination of things. There's an arch, which starts on the edge (there's an offset from the corner) end terminates on the same edge (on the other side, obviously). While it's generation the arch passes through a third point which belong to another segment. This last connects the mid point of the original edge (base triangle) with the centroid. The result is a kind of polyline, with two segments and an arch. If you go back to the image of the component that I posted probably you'll understand what I'm saying better than with the definition.
The posit…
ns. but first allow me to explain what i'm trying to do: i have a serial device i want to talk to, but i have to do it using some sort of handshaking. for instance, when i send a command/data, i need to wait for an appropriate response before sending another. i have used andy payne's general serial components from firefly, but i don't think they'll work for what i want to do, and in general, i want to know how to do this from scratch. i'm using the pyserial library to do the comm, and i can get it to work within one script. here's an example of a working (mostly) port open/close script (x=input param for baud, y=input param for port name, z=boolean input param for open/close):
import serialmyPort=serial.Serial()myPort.baudrate = xmyPort.port = yif z == True: try: myPort.open() except: print "Something went wrong. Cannot open port." if myPort.isOpen() == True: print myPort.name + " is open" if z != True: try: myPort.close() except: print "Something went wrong. Cannot close port." if myPort.isOpen != True: print myPort.name + " is closed"
this all works well and good. here are my questions:
1) I can open the port and then close it. however, if i try to re-open it, i get an access denied error. it seems rhino is holding the port open, as i have to re-start rhino to get it working again. i read through the discussions and didn't see any definitive answers to this problem. any advice?
2) I'd like to share this port with other components (or at least break up the functions of opening/closing the port and read/write, not unlike how the firefly components are organized), but i have no idea how to share an object instance between components. i did see that there is a sticky dict and tried to add myPort to it, but i kept getting errors in the other component when i try to use the object's methods. for instance:
Component 1 Script:
import serial
import scriptcontext
myPort=serial.Serial("COM4", 9600)
scriptcontext.sticky['myPort']=myPort
Component 2 Script:
import serial
import scriptcontext
myPort=scriptcontext.sticky['myPort']
print myPort.read()
but i get messages like:
Runtime error (MissingMemberException): 'Serial' object has no attribute '_port_handle'
any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!
best,
~BB~…
.
Today we have gone live, and the plugin is available on Food4Rhino. You will find an installer package, sample files, and a demo video on getting started:
http://www.food4rhino.com/project/human-ui
Visit the Bitbucket Repo and poke around in the code:
https://bitbucket.org/andheum/humanui
Check out today's coverage in Architect Magazine:
http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/nbbj-releases-human-ui-to-bring-parametric-modeling-to-the-masses_o
Finally join our group and ask any questions or post any comments here:
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/human-ui
See below for detailed description!
----------------------------------
Human UI
Primary Development by:
Lead Developer: Andrew Heumann / andheum / @andrewheumann
Product Manager: Marc Syp / marcsyp / @mpsyp
Contributing Developer: Nate Holland / nateholland / @_NateHolland
Gone are the days of faking a user interface by laying out sliders and text panels and hiding wires on the Grasshopper canvas. Human UI interfaces are entirely separate from the Grasshopper canvas and leverage the power of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in the Windows environment.
OLD NEW
In other words: Human UI makes your GH definition feel like a Windows app. Create tabbed views, dynamic sliders, pulldown menus, checkboxes, and even 3D viewports and web browsers that look great and make sense to anyone--including designers and clients with no understanding of Grasshopper.
Human UI has been in development at NBBJ for over a year, as part of a larger NBBJ Design Computation initiative to deliver our tools internally as Products -- with fully automated installation, managed dependencies, analytics, documentation, and “magical” user experience. Human UI has been a huge component of the user experience part of this puzzle, and we are excited to share it with the larger Grasshopper community so that others can benefit from it and contribute to its development.
The initial release of Human UI is accompanied by a few simple examples to get you started, but we have developed sophisticated user interfaces with these tools at NBBJ and will slowly be rolling out more advanced examples. We also look forward to opening up the development to the community and seeing what new features and paradigms we can add.
Download the plugin at Food4Rhino and get started building Custom UIs for Grasshopper right away! We are happy to answer any questions or field discussion in the dedicated Grasshopper Group. Please join us!
Join the Grasshopper Group
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/human-ui
Download the plugin + sample files
http://www.food4rhino.com/project/human-ui
Visit the Bitbucket Repo
https://bitbucket.org/andheum/humanui
We look forward to seeing where this project takes you, please share your projects made with Human UI!
Sincerely,
Design Computation Leadership Team, NBBJ
…
nter the programming world and tinker more complex, interactive solutions. We will also explore advanced programming paradigms. There is no class official programming language, as both C# and Vb.Net are possible on the participant’s side, and all examples will be provided in both C# and Vb.Net. Additionally, we will see how to get started writing full .Net plug-ins. Finally, we will have time to explore user’s own proposals on the third day.
Day 1 Morning: programming introduction in .Net
• The Grasshopper scripting components. Choosing a .Net language. Language developments
• Variables declaration, assignment and utilization. Operators. Methods [functions]. Calls
• Classes: declaration and instancing. Constructors. Importing a namespace. On3dPoints, OnLines
• Arrays declaration and usage. Lists. Adding to arrays and lists, advantages and opportunities.
Afternoon: patterns
• About OOP (object oriented programming) as opposed to procedural programming. Discussion
• Example of OOP good code reuse: sorting points by coordinates using the .Net SDK classes
• Lists as input parameters. Trees as input parameters. Usage and limitations
• Finding resources: on the net with website that can help getting started and troubleshoot. And books
Day 2 Morning: extending Grasshopper functionality with our definitions
• Store data between updates. The use of fields [globals, or static locals]
• Examples on how to use stored data between updates: a simple agents simulation
• Baking geometry with scripting directly into the Rhino document. Baking with names
• Passing custom types from a scripted component to another one. Our own code reusability
• Rendering an animation from Grasshopper. How to get started and final results
Afternoon: customizing our tools
• Our Rhino plug-in with Visual Studio C# [Vb.Net] Express Edition & wizard. Parametric mesher
• Writing a custom Grasshopper component: hacking an exporter for our data to Excel
Day 3 All day: personal project
• Rehearsal on any example from the first two days. A project that you want to start on your own, being it a Rhinoceros plug-in, a Grasshopper assembly or a script. Example might be to send data through network with UDP to Processing
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
A good foundation of Grasshopper visual programming is mandatory. You will need a level which corresponds to the Grasshopper 101 course outline. Examples of things that will not be covered in this course are: sorting document spheres by diameter, paneling of a surface with grasshopper components. You are expected to already know these from the Grasshopper course.…
ur setup. Can you say what sensor you are using? Are you using an Arduino to write this ascii information to the serial port? If so, there may be some formatting code for the string that you'll need to do to get the Read component to function properly. I see that you were able to open the port and Start reading... so my first thought is that the data is formatted correctly....
All of the read components look for a specific character (in this case two characters) to indicate when it has reached the end of the line being read and should spit out the data. In this case, Firefly uses the Carriage Return (\r) and Line Feed (\n) to know when it has reached the end of the line. In arduino, these are automatically added to any line if you use the Serial.println("blah, blah, blah"); command. Notice, this is different from the Serial.print("nothing to see here"); command. This doesn't mean that you can't still use the regular print command... it's just you need to use the println command to indicate when you've reached the end of the line. Let's take a look at a simple example.
void setup() { Serial.begin(9600);}void loop() { int sensorValue = analogRead(A0); Serial.print("The value of the sensor is: "); Serial.println(sensorValue);
delay(20); // important to wait some small time so you aren't sending just a ton of info over to GH which will cause it to crash :(
}
The first print statement prints a string to the serial port... and the next one adds the current sensor value... and THEN adds the carriage return and line feed to start a new line. The nice thing about using these together is that you can concatenate any type of data you want. If you were to upload this sketch, you should see a sentence being printed to the serial port that says "The value of the sensor is: 512". I made up the number, but you get the idea. Notice, I also had to include a delay function. You don't always need this (there are other ways to go about this) but the important thing to note is that the loop cycle on the Arduino can run really fast. I mean... really fast. So, you wont want to send so much data over to GH, because this could flood the string buffer in the Read component and cause it to crash (eventually). It's a good idea to add some small time interval just to slow it down a bit. I should say that I've optimized the refresh rate in the next release so it's significantly faster... so hopefully this wont be as big of a problem... but hopefully that helps some.
Now... Why are you writing data to a sensor? Sensors by default are considered inputs... so I'm quite confused as to why you would want to send data back (if you are... then you need some way to handle the string data being sent from GH... this is the whole reason we built the Firefly firmata... it sets up the two-way protocol so you don't have to deal with all of that mess... If you're going to read and write, you're better off just uploading the firmata and using the Uno Read and Write components). Also, I'm not very familiar with the Hyperterm or Advanced Serial Port Terminal... but I will say that could get COM conflicts if you're trying to open the port with different tools. Anyway, I hope some of this helps you get up and running.
Cheers,
Andy
…
eaningful. Humans must interact with it. Information arises when humans examine the data. Knowledge is created when information is transformed through human social interactions.”
Richard Gayle via spacecollective
The space in which we live can be monitored in many aspects and appears to be to be a gradient of data in continuous evolution and change. One of the major advantages of parametric tools is to be able to inform the design processes with accurate, specific and variable, in space and time, data streams .
DATA BODIES is a Grasshopper workshop that will focus on how its nature as an information processor and how it can be (ab)used in order to manipulate data, streaming inputs from various sources and use datafeeds to inform geometry or data structures from the very simple up to more complex ones. The aim is to give an understanding of information and data articultion as already a spatial and architectural operation; results may range from pure data communication protocols, dataviz or data-driven geometries depending on the skill levels and aspirations of each participant. The brief is also open to the suggestions and opportunities that may rise during the workflow.
DETAILS: http://www.superbelleville.org/dataworkshop/…
Introduction to Grasshopper Videos by David Rutten.
Wondering how to get started with Grasshopper? Look no further. Spend an some time with the creator of Grasshopper, David Rutten, to learn the