Day 38: OpenGL bugs, new PSU, 123d-AR plan, documentation

Plan of the 123D-AR demo

How it's all going to work! Used OneNote to splash out the basic draft of how everything works and sent it to Toby for review. It's a little muddled but hopefully sensical enough.

123D

Saw this 123D capture from Animation13, which interestingly managed to grab the television screen:

Good one

Interesting. Anyway..

I found you can actually upload multiple 123D captures simultaneously, just run multiple instances of the program and they all work independently. This will save a lot of time and allow us to get through many more 123D -> AR capture processes at events.

You just need to remember to make sure you are signed in on all of the 123D programs running simultaneously. If you aren't signed in you can't export models.

OpenGL 3.3

Helped Georgiana fix a bug issue with OpenGL 3 today, she's been porting the older OpenGL 1 lab code to the newer version to make it a little more up to date. Previously, the code to draw primitives (like a circle) would take points sequentially so you could have a loop that generated the next point to draw on every iteration and passed it to the function. The new version of OpenGL however, takes an array of complete points at once (and as per standard C, you tell it how many points from the array to wish it to draw).

Attempts to pass points into the new functions by iterating a loop was the root of the problem, and was soon fixed. Now we get correctly drawn circles and primitives! The change means we need to make an array to hold all the points before they are passed to the drawing function, which requires an extra variable in memory.

Donald's new PSU

... is installed and running very nicely indeed. Astoundingly quiet and reliable device, a BeQuiet! L8 600W. Should outlast the rest of the system by a good few years I hope.

Documentation

Started making the user manual for the AR. Will have a sheet with instructions for the 123D operator, and another one with instructions for the AR operator, which include instructions, FAQs,  general guidelines and whatnot.

Will also make documentation for how to reinstall AR - 123D on  new machines.