Simulation Point Plugin

A HiCAD Plugin, that moves a node and saves the coordinates of a base and a observer point to a csv.

Build

Open the .sln file in Visual Studio. Start or build project from there. Probably change all reference paths to where the HiCAD Installation is located. dotnet build fails for no real reason. Starting will fail because we are building a .dll.

Installation

First shutdown HiCAD!

In the folder: /SimulationPointsPlugin/obj/Debug/

should now be two files: HiCAD.Plugin.SimulationPointsPlugin.dll HiCAD.Plugin.SimulationPointsPlugin.pdb

Make a new folder: ./HiCAD/exe/Plugins/SimulationPointsPlugin

Now to this file: .\HiCAD\exe\Plugins\Plugins.config

Add these lines along where the plugin examples are:

  <Plugin Assembly="SimulationPointsPlugin.dll"
          Enabled="yes"
          LocationType="Path"
          RelativePath=".\SimulationPointsPlugin" />

Now restart HiCAD. There should be a SimulationPointsPlugin Register Window open on the right side.

Usage

• Enter the filename where the resulting csv will be written to.
• Give how many steps should be used (TODO: needs to be a integer for now)
• Give the total movement in mm.
• Give the name of the variable that generates the movement.
• New Simulation does currently not much.
• Select the top node where the variable is living in.
• Select any a base point that you want to observe.
• Select any other point that you want to observe.
• Run the thing. Running again adds to the csv.

Now 2 files have been generated. Your csv with the observed point for every step. A C:\temp\SimPoint.log which gives Debug info if something goes wrong.

More TODO

• The node, where the points are living in need to have a activated feature protocol for some reason.
• Currently we create two named points 99+98 to track it later. We should either get rid of them or at least remove the point again.
• Make default values to be read from a config file or store them in the HiCAD config. Also hardcoded values like debug level and path.