Christmas presents - utilities by CAD Studio

For the nineth time, like all the years before, CAD Studio gives out a couple of free useful CAD tools as Christmas presents for all CAD users. As a part of this tradition, this year's Christmas-tree utilities are the following:

• GeoRefImg - automatic positioning, scaling and rotating of georeferenced raster images in AutoCAD, including export of World files - you can work with aerials in plain AutoCAD
  
• Floor legend for Revit generates automatic legends for floor structures (see the video)
  
• Lay2Dwg exports drawing layers to individual DWG files (one DWG per layer), now with drawing name prefix
  
• AttApp adds a given number (numeric-wise) or prefix/suffix (string-wise) to the selected block attributes in AutoCAD
  
• DynFrame frames selected AutoCAD texts by a dynamic frame (by chynging them to MLeaders) - the frame will follow future editing of the texts
  
• CreateInterference - a VBA macro that creates a true collision solid of any 3D interference of parts in an Inventor assembly
  
• Csv2Table imports CSV files (Excel) directly to AutoCAD tables (creates tables from comma-delimited files)
  
• SlopeTick draws batter lines on AutoCAD polylines (slope hatch)
  
• Sol2Mesh and Sol2Faces convert AutoCAD 3D solids to 3D meshes (surfaces) or to individual 3D faces
  
• TwittControl makes use of the ACADtweet tool to remotely control AutoCAD over Twitter (see the video)
  
• TRANS - translation of drawing texts in AutoCAD - you can use the manual or automatic (Bing) translation even in the trial version of this tool
  

All these new applications (plus many others) can be downloaded from our web sites www.cadstudio.cz and www.cadforum.cz.

Make your AutoCAD listen to commands sent via Twitter

Well, I admit there is only a limited practical use for such scenarios but this can be used as a proof of concept or as an inspiration for similar applications.

Our ACADtweet add-on tool is a general-use Twitter interface for AutoCAD. Built upon this interface, TwittControl is an AutoCAD LISP utility that listens on a specified Twitter feed and performs all commands submitted on this feed as specifically formatted tweets. So you can tweet your AutoCAD e.g. "_CIRCLE 0,0 100;" to draw a circle at the origin point. See more samples in the @ACcontrol1 feed.

Both ACADtweet and TwittControl are free tools (downloadable from www.cadstudio.cz) so you can test it in your drawing environment. Load both tools and start the TwittControl command. AutoCAD enters an infinite "listen" loop waiting for any tweets on the specified Twitter channel.

See more information in the tip Control your AutoCAD remotely and in the sample video: