Our IT department will be performing some routine maintenance on Monday. As such, the Project Freewheel servers will be down from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific time. We thank you for your patience and your continued interest in Project Freewheel. We're always glad to hear Project Freewheel usage stores at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.
I found another example of Project Freewheel in the wild. Check out:
It's great to see our technoloy previews in action.
We are eager to listen.
Project Freewheel is our experimental version of Freewheel. We are currently using it as a means to get feedback on a software as a service based approach to collaboration. Think of it as Autodesk Design Review without the install or an Autodesk Design Review that runs on the Mac and Linux.
Autodesk Freewheel is our production version of the service. It allows you to view design data on platforms that Autodesk Design Review does not reach, i.e. Mac and Linux.
3D/2D ShareNow is a utility that allows you to share your designs using Project Freewheel with just one click. While working with your design in AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, or Design Review, you can instantly publish a DWF to Project Freewheel. Once in Project Freewheel, you can use its collaboration features for a real-time or anytime electronic review process.
With the brief Autodesk Freewheel outage last Monday, many of you were kind enough to contact us when you encountered an error. As a follow up, we'd like to hear your Freewheel stories. Are you using Autodesk Freewheel or Project Freewheel? Do you use ShareNow? Should ShareNow also publish to Autodesk Freewheel in addition to Project Freewheel? What are your thoughts? Please let us know at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.
Listening to user input is alive in the lab.
Autodesk Freewheel usage remains steady - a technology you can count on.
Service for Autodesk Freewheel has been restored. Thanks for your patience and your continued use of Autodesk Freewheel.
Autodesk Freewheel is down:
http://freewheel.autodesk.com/
Project Freewheel is up:
http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com/
The Autodesk Labs team is responsible for Project Freewheel. Autodesk Freewheel is maintained by another department within the company. Thanks to everyone who alerted Autodesk Labs about Autodesk Freewheel. I am in contact with the other department regarding the situation.
Project Freewheel is our software as a service approach to viewing and collaboration using just a web browser. Think of it as Autodesk Design Review without the install. Or think of it as a way to view designs on the Macintosh, Linux, or cell phones. In addition to being an interactive viewer (pan, zoom, 3D orbit, etc.), Project Freewheel can be used to generate static images. The static images are just like GIFs or JPEGs that are traditionally used in conjunction with HTML. The advantage of using Project Freewheel to generate them is that when the design is updated, the image is regenerated. This allows companies to include designs on their company web sites and only need to update the designs but not touch their web sites for web site visitors to see the latest and greatest designs.
A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey writes in:
How large of an image can I generate with Project Freewheel?
Software Architect, Ben Cochran noted:
The Project Freewheel API that returns an image has an upper limit to the size of the image that it will compute. Since the number of pixels goes up by the square of the resolution, allowing people to increase the requested image width or height to large sizes can make the number of pixels Project Freewheel has to compute grow exponentially. When this happens, the Project Freewheel server requires very large amounts of RAM. To prevent malicious users from intentionally crashing Project Freewheel, we limit the amount of RAM any one image request can make. For Project Freewheel this value is 7,480,000 pixels. When exceeding this value on Project Freewheel, the caller of theAPI gets an “Error rendering DWF File” message.
Autodesk Labs VP, Brian Mathews, chimed in with an HTML page that provided some sample code. I have posted it to my blog:
Keep those questions coming in to labs.freewheel@autodesk.com. Helping clarify how design data can be viewed using just a web browser is alive in the lab.
Our IT department planned on conducting some network maintenance on
April 3 from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm Pacific time.
Service to Project Freewheel and Project Showroom would have been affected and these technology previews would not have been available. The maintenance work has been postponed. I will post another message at a later date when the window is rescheduled. Thanks for your patience.
Our IT department will be conducting some server maintenance today:
April 1 from 9:00 am - 11:00 am Pacific time.
Project Freewheel will be unavailable. We thank you for your patience.
AutoCAD 2010 was made available on Tuesday. I'll resist the temptation to make some type of pun based on 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke. Instead I'll harken back to August 24, 2004 with Shaan Hurley's original Between the Lines posting that included the impossible triangle:
A Really Cool 3D DWF File! "Le triangle impossible"
The drawing was created by Patrick EMIN of the French CAD web site http://www.cadxp.com. I have always liked this drawing, so I thought I would try it out with AutoCAD 2010. I created a 3D DWF of the drawing. The default for AutoCAD 2010 is now DWFx. So my Publish command created Le triangle impossible 2010.dwfx. I loaded this file into Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and got the message:
This is indeed a 3D file. Internet Explorer 7 only views the 2D data in a DWFx file. The message displayed lets me know that there is more in the file to be viewed.
While it is true that I could have installed Autodesk Design Review 2010 to view the 3D data, as a Labs guy, I uploaded Patrick's design to Project Freewheel. This lets anyone view 2D or 3D design data in a DWFx without installing anything - just using their browser. You can even embed the design in a web page as I have done in this blog entry.
Download Letriangleimpossible2010.dwfx (102.0K)
But the fun does not stop there. As AutoCAD 2010 exports to STL files, I also wanted to hold the impossible triangle in my very hands. AutoCAD Product Manager, Guillermo Melantoni, helped me clean up the data so it would be water tight. I then exported the drawing as an STL file and had the design printed on a 3D printer using the Red Eye On Demand service. Here it is:
Sharing designs electronically (DWFx) and physically (STL) is alive in the lab.
Bird in the wild: Birds in the trees are often hard to see, but if you look hard enough, you can find them.
We love it when we get email about how customers are using Project Freewheel. Like last month, this month we received:
From: LenTech Services
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 1:27 PM
To: Labs.Freewheel
Subject: Happy with Project Freewheel
Hello,
I just wanted to let you know that Project Freewheel turned out to be the perfect solution for showing sample drawings on my newly developed website. After numerous attempts at finding a solution for showing the drawings, none were really satisfactory. I then came upon Project Freewheel, and once I figured out how to integrate it into my web site (this was my first attempt at creating web pages), which was not difficult, my problem was solved.
Check out the design that is integrated into his site:
Although Len was new to creating web pages, note how Len used the &mode=ViewOnly parameter. By doing this, you can see Len's design but cannot use the File menu to open a different design. This is exactly what this parameter was intended for. Way to go Len.
For this blog posting I included a thumbnail of Len's design using Project Freewheel.
This was done with one line of HTML:
<img height=180 alt=sample src="http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com/dwfImage.aspx?cx=0.5&cy=0.5&scale=1&page=1&width=200&height=180&
path=http://members.shaw.ca/lentech/LenTech_Samples_03.dwf" width=200>
If Len updates his design, the image in this blog posting will automatically update. How cool is that? For more information on the parameters available when working with Project Freewheel, see the developer page.
If you are using Project Freewheel, please drop us a line at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.
Once again appreciating Project Freewheel as it appears "in the wild" is alive in the lab.
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