This is my attempt at creating a general purpose work environment for engineers. I think of it as 'Blender' but for engineers.
It tightely couples spreadsheet, CAD modeling data and technical reports together. This is done by allowing the user to add spreadsheet-like formulas as object parameters.
By making this app I also want to reinvent spreadsheets and word processors a little bit. The spreadsheet for example is not WYSIWYG but rather visualises data types.
I have been working on my CAD environment + spreadsheet app &proctor
I moved all user interaction type of code (context sensitive UI, element picking, line drawing,...) from an event driven system to a polling system. The code is much less and a lot easier to read and work on.
Hidden line generation was surprisingly hard to get fast enough (rendering alone would be easy, but I need the actual line information for future PDF generation).
I made a ton of progress on this. Interaction between spreadsheet and model elements works now. After some refactoring, I will add more CAD elements and spreadsheet formulas. After that I will implement the ability to create your own (compound) CAD elements, model-views, sheets/paper layouts and probably a scripting language + editor. &proctor
I rewrote the spreadsheet and the parameter view + tons of other bug fixes and simplifications 🙂 &proctor
I made progress on the "CAD view" and on the "parameter view". The interactions between all the UI elements is not done yet (which is the most important part of this project), but I think I figured it out how to do them. The whole UI / interaction system (which is event/callback based, retained mode) is not very elegant, but it does its job.
There are a lot of design decisions to make, for example: Which panel should handle which key press? Is the user allowed to do stuff in the spreadsheet during a modelling command? ... Figuring those out is a lot more work than I anticipated at the start of this project.
A lot of bugs are coming up. I need to implement inspection tools and visualisations.
I also figured out how to do icons in Inkscape. I work on icons whenever I get too frustrated with programming 🙂 &proctor
Still can't do anything useful with it yet (other than some very basic spreadsheet things) but I am making progress! I worked on the palette-manager, menus, CAD line rendering and the interaction-system that glues all the elements of this program together.
Next on my ToDo list is basic CAD elements and getting parameters of selected spreadsheet cells or CAD elements into the parameter view to the right.
I decided to call this project "Proctor" for now (it has a good ring to it and reminds me of "Blender" which is a huge inspiration for this). &proctor
This is a lot of work, but "Little strokes fell big oaks" as they say 🙂 &proctor
A side project I am working on. A combination of the two most important engineering tools: CAD and spreadsheets. The idea is you can add / change / calculate on CAD data via a spreadsheet, but also use it for making custom UIs and tools. &proctor
