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March 2011

14 posts from February 2011

This week I will be in Florida on vacation for the final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133 on Thursday February 24th, 2011 at 4:40pm EST. I will be tweeting and posting photos from the launch pad 39A during the Rotating Service Structure retraction Wednesday night and the live launch from the turning basin location at Kennedy Space Center. Look for me near the famous countdown clock in any broadcasts of the launch including NASA TV Watch NASA TV. Read more →


Updated Shape Extraction for AutoCAD Now Available

This Shape Extraction for AutoCAD plugin on Autodesk Labs allows you to convert points from a point cloud acquired by a laser scan or photogrammetry and extract planar, spherical, and cylindrical shapes. I am currently working with a very large data set of the Seattle Gas Works provided by FARO, and I will be posting on this blog a detailed work flow example. Read more →


Back in AutoCAD version 2.18, Autodesk placed a sample drawing with AutoCAD named the Solar.DWG to demonstrate the precision of AutoCAD back in the early eighties. AutoCAD was based used 64bit floating point precision and the most accurate back then. With this Solar DWG you can see our solar system in 1:1 scale in kilometer units. Read more →


I recently learned of a business where it shares equipment to design and build projects for a membership. Friday I paid a visit to one of their newest locations in San Francisco, in fact the paint was still drying on the front entrance. I am confident not everyone has a full welding shop, machine shop, electrical design workbench, wood shop, textile equipment, 3D scanning, 3D printing, high end computers and classrooms loaded with the latest and greatest software such as AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor and more at their house. For those without access to all the equipment to design and build whatever your heart desires, TechShop is the solution you have been looking for. You can let your inner "Maker" out. Read more →


This Week at Autodesk and NASA

This week I am in the San Francisco Bay Area.visiting the Autodesk home office today and tomorrow, It is always great seeing colleagues and seeing what is going on, even the ten foot tall inflatable dinosaur on the second floor. I will be posting and tweeting whenever I have a spare minute. On Friday, I will be visiting NASA Ames Moffett Field in Mountain View. I received an invitation to the first NASA Twitter Meetup event named a NASATweetup at NASA Ames for a special behind the scenes tour and NASATweetup. I am truly excited to be attending as a person who promotes engineering, design, science, and technology. Read more →


As of February 1st I have moved to the Autodesk Labs group within Autodesk as a Technology Evangelist. It is a full circle for me as I developed the first Autodesk Labs site and posted several projects back in 2006, now I finally get to work in the group. I will be working with the teams supporting and evangelizing the Labs hosted technologies to current and future customers. Read more →


What a great way to teach, and a fun way to learn through creative problem solving. Personally I would have named it Tinderbox for the fire in Science and Engineering it could spark. Young people or in my case much older kids have fun while experimenting using physics to engineer machines they can share with others. I was up most of the night playing aka tinkering around with this app. Read more →