24 Aug 2015
How to fix the ‘Common Language Runtime was unable to set the breakpoint’ error in Visual Studio projects
When you have multiple projects which link together, it can be handy to have them open in Visual Studio to debug through or work on them. This is especially true if you’re using libraries which contain common code across projects. That is the purpose of a DLL after all (or static library), to provide common
24 Aug 2015
How to obtain minimum and maximum values from lists in Grasshopper – Version 2
In this previous post I showed the ways in which we can obtain the minimum and maximum values from lists of numbers in Grasshopper. I presented three solutions, using native Grasshopper components (with unintuitive naming), building your own using a C# script, or using a component which I offered for download. Since then, I found
19 Aug 2015
How to add custom User Data to Rhino Objects
Objects in Rhino (the 3D modelling software, not the organs of the animal) have the option to attach custom user data that you may wish to share across tools. This might be of particular use in Grasshopper, enabling you to send one piece of geometry down the wires with custom data attached, rather than having
18 Aug 2015
How to stop components from automatically displaying results in Grasshopper
When you run a component in Grasshopper, if there are outputs associated to it, the outputs will be visualised in Rhino without you needing to do much. This is part of the ‘preview’ feature of a component, but sometimes, you might not want the users to automatically see the output. For example, if you have
17 Aug 2015
How to pass custom data between Grasshopper components
Grasshopper is designed to work with components that handle specific functions, rather than components which try to do an ‘all-in-one’ approach. When designing your own custom Grasshopper components, there might be a need to pass custom data along the wires between components. This is easy enough to do when you know how, but getting to
11 Aug 2015
How to obtain the minimum and maximum values from a list in Grasshopper
Sometimes you need to know what the minimum and the maximum values are in a list or from a collection of lists. In Grasshopper, there are min and max components which will take two values and return the minimum and maximum respectively, but there isn’t a component for finding the min/max values within a list
31 Jul 2015
How to fix ‘type load exception’ when loading a Grasshopper component
As mentioned previously, I’ve been working in James’ territory on a Grasshopper component as part of my research. The tool is now ready for testing and as such, I gave copied of the .gha file and background .dll file to a colleague to test on their machine. However, instead of loading the component, Grasshopper threw
28 Jul 2015
VBA – Sending keyboard commands
In previous posts (here and here) we’ve looked at keyboard listeners with a view to have our program listen for keyboard presses from the user and act upon them. In this post, we’re going to have a look at the opposite, whereby our program sends a key command to the operating system for another program
23 Jul 2015
How to convert OpenCV cv::mat to System Bitmap to System ImageSource
OpenCV is an open source computer vision library which can be used for a wide variety of things such as face recognition, people detection, motion tracking, video editing and image manipulation. For my undergraduate project, I made use of the OpenCV libraries to create a facial recognition system. It used a webcam to detect ID
22 Jul 2015
How to access geometry Guids in Grasshopper components
This month has been a nice month for software development in my research, working on creating new analysis for healthcare design. The majority of it has been relatively straight forward (except the interpolation issue) working in C++ to produce the analysis. However, to move towards a tool which can be used in industry, I have