I am working on project and my task is to export house plan from AutoCAD to some format that is most adaptable for SCADA. Any suggestion will help me. Thanks!
As you didn't specify which HMI/SCADA package, you'll get a general answer. Since ALL packages are basically a GUI, a bitmap (.bmp) graphic will be fine for most, if not all.
One thing I do know for sure, Rockwell's FactoryTalk View will allow you to import a .dxf file, but I think this is the only package that will let you do this. WinCC and InTouch certainly don't have this kind of support.
For the sake of compatibility, an image file would be best.
I'm one of developers of open source Scada-LTS.
We can add functionality of loading svg or 3dx background on view (HMI) in Scada-LTS.
Your dfx file can be converted into svg or x3d format.
For example you may use:
http://kabeja.sourceforge.net to svg convertion.
https://www.blender.org to x3d convertion.
Schneider ClearSCADA is capable of importing dxf files into HMI screens with some limitations
I do a lot of SCADA work and to honest I have yet to come across a package that has a anything but garbage for a graphics editor. The one exception is Wonderware's archestra ide...but for a home project you won't be using that!
I would recommend creating an image for a background (png, jpg, etc) and then laying your animated graphics and data on top of that. My tools of choice are Sketchup for CAD tasks, Inkscape for vector graphic tasks, and Blender for 3d rendering. Then I take the assets created in those tools and bring them into whatever SCADA package I'm working with.
Related
We have an existing three.js application and are experimenting with adding support for cad designs. Previously we managed these with some custom rendering of geojson data that we created from DXF files, but now we're looking to use Autodesk Forge to allow support for more data types and pre-process the data before rendering.
As a preface, we cannot simply just use the Forge viewer threejs version as this would involve us rewriting our entire application to be built as extensions on top of the Forge viewer.
So the plan is, for 3D files, I'm looking at downloading the obj/mtl files from the Forge api and loading those directly in vanilla three.js using their OBJLoader2 example. Based off my initial testing, this appears to work and renders to my liking. I can control how the meshes are created and ensure it is optimized to work within my application.
The problem comes when I'm trying to load 2D files as the forge api only lets me download f2d files which as far as I know, I have no way of loading these using vanilla three.js. Any ideas? Is there another format 2D designs will export as that I might be able to load independently?
At the moment I don't know of a simple pipeline to load 2D in plain Three.js. By 2d I am guessing that you mean dwg/dxf, if not the case be more explicit... Forge Model Derivatives REST API doesn't provide another export format from dwg than svf (f2d).
You could convert a 2d dwg into a 3d one by adding a 3d solid to it for example, but then I don't know what the obj export would be, probably not really interesting but you may want to give it a try.
Another option would be to use the Design Automation API with AutoCAD, you could upload a dwg and run some custom dll that would convert the drawing into your custom format that you can then load in your viewer, this will require AutoCAD ObjectARX or .Net API expertise and depending on the complexity of the drawings you plan to handle, may be a fair piece of work.
Finally you may want to consider using the Forge Viewer, even if that means rewriting parts of your app, the viewer is based on Three.js so you may be able to migrate some of your features rather easily, all the UI is just html/css and you can integrate any UI JavaScript framework on top of it. This may end up being a more powerful and flexible solution in the long term than a convoluted pipeline of translations between formats... By exporting 3d to obj you are also loosing all metadata embedded in a CAD file, this may or may not be an issue to you.
I hope that helps
Useful when implementing a design, to make the design pixel accurate.
I've used the pixel perfect plugin for firefox to do this, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. The best would be a separate program that can be used independently of browser. Any recommendations?
I'm working on a javascript tool for developers to manage image overlays: https://github.com/frontfoot/overlay_me
I found another solution though that is corresponding to your need: http://makiapp.com/
My version of the tool is a bit more developer oriented, as you can have a pack of overlaying images loading automatically per project, and also keeping the possibility to inspect DOM elements while overlaying things.
The makiapp tool is a more accessible, designer oriented, where you can upload a local file.
My tool is at its first stage and need feedback BTW ;)
I am searching for an easy webapp or windows application where i can design a system architecture. Creating boxes for different zones, e.g. demilitarized zone, adding servers, databases and protocols and also connecting them with each others. It should be more hardware orientied, with nice graphics of databases and computer – not like a screen mockup tool or a UML modeler. Is there something like this out there?
For this, I have to recommend both Dia and Microsoft Visio. I'm not sure what image sets the latest version of Visio comes with. I can state for sure that Dia offers image sets that contain the symbols that you most likely need to complete your task.
You can use inkscape which is a general purpose SVG editor that has, by default, a plugin that allows you get images from http://www.openclipart.org/. There are quite decent pictures of Computers and Hardware that you can use.
There's also the xfig program but it's got a very old school UI.
I'm searching for a tool that will take a source directory and produce a single PDF containing the source code, preferably with syntax highlighting.
I would like to read the PDF on my phone, in order to get familiar with a code-base, or just to see what I can learn by reading a lot of code. I will most often be reading Ruby.
I would prefer if the tool ran on Linux. I don't mind paying for a tool if it is particularly good.
Any suggestions?
You could wipe something up yourself with Prawn and Ultraviolet.
PDF is no good for reflowing. You might like a html based solution better.
And in reading existing code, a lineair model is no good. You need to jump from one file to the other. A hypertext model with history would probably work best on the limited screen estate of a phone. It should borrow some features of the smalltalk IDEs (jump to senders, implementors).
For the UI, take a look at clamato
GNU source-highlight supports many languages and can output LaTeX in particular that can be converted to pdf.
The SciTE editor can export the currently edited file (with syntax highlighting) to PDF (and HTML, RTF, LaTeX and XML).
Alas, it doesn't have batch conversion capability, but IIRC somebody made a batch tool out of this code base.
I realize this is very late, but I wanted to do the same thing, except I wanted it for my tablet, which is a Galaxy Note 10.1 with a Wacom digitizer that I can use to annotate code. I found that one good solution is to use Doxygen to generate a PDF which will have hyperlinks and everything you would want in a PDF. For my use case, I would pair it with EzPDF on Android to annotate the code. This was also for the purpose of learning a new codebase. In the end I ended up not using the generated PDF but it was pretty usable.
I'm using the GoDiagrams suite which seems to recommend .emf files for node images since they scale better on resizing. Bitmaps get all blurry.
Google doesn't show up any good tools that seem to do this... So to reiterate I'm looking for a image converter (preferably free) that converts an image (in one of the common formats like Bitmaps or JPEGs or GIFs) to an .EMF File.
Update: I dont need to do it via code. Simple batch-conversion of images will do.
Inkscape works well, it was recommended to me here.
Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com) supports many image formats (including .emf). It's also small, fast, and very full-featured. It is free for non-commercial and educational use. I use it for all my image-conversion needs as it will work on batches of files and can rename them as it saves.
Image Magick contains a tool called convert, that will convert from just about anything to EMF files. You can either use this as a separate application, or interface to it using an API that is available in several different languages.
XnView (http://www.xnview.com). Very good viewer and converter.
Try ImageConverter Plus
Try http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/. It is opensource and it has good results. Download from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=11789
Really funny one Microsoft. Now this might seem outlandish but it works... (I have Visio2007). Just found this out from a colleague
You can drop a JPEG into Microsoft Visio (no less), Do a 'Save As' to .emf and voila! nice quality of a picture too.