Vectorworks and IoT

[elepp]

Hi,

 

I don't know where else to post this, but I wanted to just drop this idea somewhere. It's not a real project just a thought experiment:

What if we use the Vectorworks data visualisation to highlight if appliances are turned on or off?

The process would be as follows. We create our appliances in Vectorworks with a record, that has the state of the appliance in a boolean format. This record would be linked to an external data base via sqlite. This data base is accessed via Google API in Google Sheets. Now we could use Zapier or ifttt to check the status of our smart appliances and update the record field in our Google Sheet. This is written into the sqlite data base. Now we update the records inside Vectorworks. Using the data visualisation we could highlight turned on objects, but also control them from inside Vectorworks.

 

Has anyone ever tried that? Any experiences with something similar?

 

Regards,

 

elepp

[Pat Stanford]

I wrote a set of vectorscripts a LONG time ago to do "Visual Accounting" for a video game arcade. We imported the daily or weekly revenue from each game and then changed the colors of the game symbols based on how much revenue each game made.

 

That way they could move the games around in the arcade and compare if it made a difference in the revenue.

 

Technically it worked. I am not sure it actually provided much value.

 

So yes, it would be possible to do what you want. The hard part will be transferring the data into and out of VW. You probably need to have an external database of devices and use and OBDC connection to bring the data into a record.

 

What you are asking about is doable, but it will take a substantial amount of work to make it work efficiently.