Brian Ekins 
Another year of Autodesk University is just finishing up and I’m realizing I should have taken at least one picture for the header of this post so I’m borrowing one from Autodesk. It was great to see some familiar faces and to meet some new ones. This year I taught one class on automating the …
It’s been way too long since my last post but I can assure you that I’m still alive but have been busy. I’ll be posting soon on some of what I’ve been working on but as part of that work, I found an issue with the Inventor Add-In template that I recently published. The issue …
Another year at Autodesk University. This year I presented two classes; the first class was on B-Rep and geometry for Inventor and Fusion 360 and the second class was on creating add-ins for Inventor. My favorite part of attending the conference is the chance to meet many of you. Here’s a picture from the add-in …
The help system for Fusion 360 was recently temporarily offline and as a result many of you saw the 404 message displayed above. For those of you using the API, you know how critical access to the help system is. When I was responsible for creating the Fusion 360 API help, the help system that …
A few weeks ago I started a new add-in and ran into a couple of problems. The issue is that I’m using Visual Studio 2017 and Inventor 2019. Missing Add-In Template The first problem is that when you install the Developer Tools that are part of the Inventor SDK, it checks to see which version(s) of Visual …
There was a recent question on the Fusion 360 Customization forum about using an RGB value to set the color of a body. Fusion 360 only allows you to assign an appearance to a body, occurrence, or face. You can’t just assign an RGB value but you can assign an appearance that is the color …
I saw a question on the Inventor Customization forum that I thought I knew the answer to, but after a quick test found that it wasn’t what I thought it was. They were having a problem with using the CommandManager.Pick method in a loop to select multiple entities. It worked ok unless the user pressed …
If you need to write a program that accesses threads in a model, the first thought it to get the thread information from the feature that created the thread. Threads can be created by adding a tapped hole or using the thread feature. This approach works but requires you to write two paths of code …
I thought of a technique for creating interesting shaped wooden models a few years ago but didn’t have the equipment to be able to test it. It was just recently that I gained access to equipment that would let me try it out. I’m calling the technique “Sub-additive Manufacturing”. It combines some of the ideas …
Some of you may know that I’ve been writing the Shaper Utilities app that allows you to export Fusion 360 designs to be used with the new Shaper Origin router. For those of you not familiar with the Shaper Origin router, it’s a new handheld CNC router that is unique in the power tool marketplace. …