Category: Mod The Machine

What I’m going to discuss isn’t anything specific to Inventor but is a general issue to be aware of when working with computers and floating point numbers. The thing you need to understand is that floating point numbers are not always exact.  They’re very very close to the expected number and close enough for computations…

Autodesk has a new cloud product called Configurator 360. (Currently available only as a 90 day free special offer) You can upload your Inventor assemblies or parts and it will allow your customers to configure the model based on Inventor parameters, iLogic rules or ETO designs. You don’t need to work with the Inventor API…

DirectoryNotFoundException using ETO Server R2 If you get a System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException when using  ETO Server 2013 R2. Check to see if this directory exists: C:\Users\InventorETOServices\Documents\Inventor Server x64 Inventor ETO Server     Note: If the InventorETOServices user has been deleted and recreated, there may be multiple user directories for it, such as:   C:\users\InventorETOServices.<MachineName>.000\Doc​uments\Inventor Server x64 Inventor…

I work for an organization at Autodesk named Developer Technical services. (We support the Autodesk Developer Network). This last week the DevTech Americas team had a meeting at one of the Autodesk offices in San Rafael California. (Colleagues from Europe and the Media and Entertainment team where there too.) We had one and a half…

Here are a couple of things about ETO 2013 R2 that I have found recently.  If you have used the Inventor ETO Add-In template you may find that the ribbon tab for the Add-In does not display properly when Inventor is launched through ETO Studio. When Intent is started from Visual Studio, it does extensive…

This section of VBA procedures converted from the help file are related to various topics. A couple of the VBA examples in this section use an InputBox to get values from the user. The C# code uses a form instead. The form is used with the attribute and units of measure example. Also The C#…

The Inventor Engineer-To-Order 2013 release 2 shipped this week and I am excited to started with it. One of the main enhancements is the Visual Studio Add-In called ETO Studio. Using Visual Studio to create Inventor ETO applications will be a nice change for ETO application developers. The previous release did have a preview of…

Over the past several months there have been webcasts on Engineer-To-Order topics. I was able to get the recordings of these sessions and will post them. The focus of the first session is “Frame-Based Positioning” and includes a comparison to “Constraint-Based Positioning. At the end there is a question and answer session that should also…

In this post you can find a discussion on using the ETO server configurator. Recently I had a case where ETO server was being used and an error “No Such Design” was occurring when  AddDynamicChildRule() was called. (One of the parameters is the name of a design). The design was available in the application and…

The most common way used to control the position of parts in ETO is the use of constraints. In some cases however it can be more advantageous to use frame based positioning to control the position. When using frame based positioning the trickiest thing is controlling the rotation. This example can be used to help…