Tag Archives: Eco Design

Open Design Project Status Report – BIM Eco Cottage

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PEX Water LinesSorry for the limited posts lately, but I’ve been bogged down somewhat with the design of the Small BIM Eco Cottage, job searching, etc. The latest work on the Eco Cottage is the routing of PEX water lines.

The image to the right shows a close-up of the PEX cold water lines I am currently routing at a location near the manifold (click). Routing flexible lines such as this in Inventor is pretty is fairly simple. You place the fixtures or targets at beginning and end of the run, then place mounts and /or targets along the route between the two, then connect the dots with a 3D sketch.

In this case, unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single part as a BIM object, so I have to model them as I go. The image below shows the copper PEX manifold for the cold water. I modeled it as an iLogic part that can have between 2 and 24 ports with several manifold sizes, line sizes, and the choice of hot or cold (red or blue lines) configuration.  

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A copper PEX Manifold

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Creating a Routed System with Vanilla Autodesk Inventor – Phase Next

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If you didn’t sleep through the previous post, you were promised some stuff at the very end. This is that stuff. It took longer than it should have as I had to get some drawings to the plumber. Without further ado…

The next part needed in this assembly is another 4” ‘Long Sweep’ elbow that goes somewhere below the circle that represents the closet flange penetration. To place this part, I needed to align the axis of one of its legs to an axis running through the center of the circle parallel to the Z Origin Axis. That axis does not exist, so I needed to create it.

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A quick note about structure before I continue. All of the layout sketches and work features being created are located within the Plumbing Layout.ipt part file which is located within the Plumbing_08-25-10.iam. All of the plumbing parts are located in the same assembly as can be seen in the image of the Browser Bar to the above (click).

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Creating a Routed System with Vanilla Autodesk Inventor

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For this series of articles, the Routed System of choice will be your average everyday home plumbing. The DWV (drain, waste, and vent) system to be exact.  

The DWV layout I am using as an example is for is for a little eco cottage design that has all of the mechanicals running through chases and partition walls to keep the thermal envelope as intact as possible — but the technique will work on any design equally well. Also of note is that the design has a FPSF (frost Protected Shallow Foundation) slab……which means there is only one chance to get things right.

The Penetrations

The penetration drawing is a plan view sketch that shows where the various pipes pass through the structure at whatever level is represented. It is created  as the first sketch in a part file located in the overall plumbing assembly. This is a hold-over from ship design days, but it works on houses as well.  

For this particular house, you can see that the stack and vents run up a 2” x 6” partition wall. There is a wet vent at the other end of the wall as well, but is not shown. All of these penetrations run down the center of the wall, and can be drawn on the same plane, which is where I started.

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Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly – Wrap-Up (for now)

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Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly

During the first attempt at testing the Photofly technology preview, I was met with a server glitch, but in the end, all went well :)

  I thought one of the biggest problems was with the interface itself. I’m not sure if this is present on all systems, but with dual wide screen monitors, the first of the images (Scenes?) began very far to the right of the interface as shown in the image to the right….

  And there were no scroll bars to slide things over. It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I found out that you need to drag the thumbnails using your cursor, and I would be willing to bet via touch screen as well. Cool, but unexpected.

 

 

Creating a Scene

To begin with, I took  a bunch of images of a globe (shown in the image above) at about 10° intervals while walking around the thing. I went around three times at different levels, and wound up with 54 images. I then fired up the Photo Scene Editor…

Photo Scene Editor Splash Screen

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BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 9

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This is it. The last of the reverse engineering of the composting toilet series. All that remains are the four knobs on the lower drawer of the humanure maker.

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The exact profile of the knobs is somewhat shady, but with a bit of educated guesswork, they’ll come out great for all intents and purposes. In the image below, you can see that I started by creating a sketch on the lower front face, then placing and centering a point on what I would call the right hand stile of the poo drawer.  The next step is to create a plane 90° to the face using the construction line that was used to center the point horizontally.

The only difference between this plane created on a line and the others in this series is that I selected the line, then instead of one of the Origin planes, I selected the face that the line sits on. The angle was left at the default 90°…   Continue reading →

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BIM Models Via Reverse Engineering With Autodesk Inventor – Part 8

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Most of the things that remain to be modeled to complete this project have been covered earlier, and are relatively easy – the four knobs on the front are the last challenge.

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I’ll run through some of the procedures that weren’t covered earlier and get the rest of the stuff modeled in this post. If there is time, I’ll move right into the knobs to finish this up, otherwise, there’ll be one more post in this series.

On the side of the unit, there is some sort of hatch that will be represented in this model as a shallow groove in the surface, and a tapped drain hole –both of which are procedures covered earlier in this series, but there are differences that should be shown. To begin, I created a plane on the furthest right horizontal edge of the model (could also have been completely off the model).   Continue reading →

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