Notes
Notes — case studies and technical write-ups
Can Claude draw in AutoCAD? Yes — a plan from a description and a drawing from a photoClaude in AutoCAD draws: describe a plan and get walls, doors, windows, dimensions and labels by layer; paste a photo of a sketch and it redraws it from the numbers or traces it into lines. Free AutoGAD plugin, open source AGPL-3.0, AutoCAD 2025/2026.ChatGPT in AutoCAD: a free plugin with your OpenAI keyThe free AutoGAD plugin brings ChatGPT (or Claude) right into AutoCAD 2025/2026: it answers questions about the drawing, calculates, checks schedules and changes text with your confirmation. All you need is an OpenAI key. Open source AGPL-3.0, releases on GitHub.How to connect Claude to AutoCAD in 5 minutes — the free AutoGAD pluginConnecting Claude to AutoCAD 2025/2026 is simple: download the free AutoGAD plugin, paste a key, open a drawing. Claude answers questions about the drawing, calculates, checks schedules and changes text with your confirmation. Open source AGPL-3.0, releases on GitHub.Does Claude work with FreeCAD? What an AI agent can and cannot do inside FreeCAD 1.0/1.1A straight answer from the author of the plugin: Claude cannot open an .FCStd file in the chat window, but an agent docked inside FreeCAD 1.0/1.1 can read the live document, look at the 3D view, measure, and edit the model — with a confirmation dialog on every change.Does Claude work with AutoCAD? Yes — the free AutoGAD pluginClaude inside AutoCAD 2025/2026: the free AutoGAD plugin answers questions about the drawing, calculates, checks schedules, draws from a description or a photo and changes text across the drawing — all with your confirmation. Open source AGPL-3.0, installs in 5 minutes, releases on GitHub.Hire a developer to build an AI agent plugin for AutoCAD, FreeCAD or your engineering software — by the hour, liveLLM agents that live inside CAD: document snapshot, read tools, confirmed write tools, per-document memory, Claude or any OpenAI-compatible model, installers. Built live on a shared screen, billed per hour. Proof: AutoGAD (AutoCAD 2025, .NET 8) and FreeGAD (FreeCAD workbench, Python).Press-ready CMYK PDFs from HTML: WeasyPrint, Ghostscript and pikepdf against a printer's specHow a product database becomes an offset-ready catalogue: WeasyPrint for layout, Ghostscript for RGB to DeviceCMYK measured against the printer's accepted master, pikepdf for pure inks, TrimBox and BleedBox, and the transparency bug that silently rasterised every page.A dependency-free SVG renderer in C11: in-place XML, exact-area coverage, and a thread poolHow a complete 2D vector stack fits in 4 280 lines of C with nothing beyond the Win32 API: an in-place XML parser, an SVG compiler with CSS selectors and GDI glyph outlines, and an analytically exact anti-aliased rasterizer that draws 1.9 M edges at 1600x1600 in about 60 ms.Claude inside FreeCAD and AutoCAD: two free plugins that work with your drawingFreeGAD and AutoGAD bring Claude right into FreeCAD 1.0/1.1 and AutoCAD 2025/2026: a chat panel next to the model or drawing, answers from what is actually drawn, edits only with your confirmation. Free, open source AGPL-3.0, releases on GitHub.How I built FOURLEDS Cloud Controllers: ESP32-C3 + LTE lighting controllers, fleet server and dashboardCase study: a cellular lighting-control system for heritage facades — six KiCad boards, ESP-IDF firmware with a PPP-over-CMUX modem recovery ladder, ESP-NOW mesh, FastAPI/TimescaleDB fleet server. ~18 sites in production.Generating a complete KiCad schematic and PCB from Python: a 4G mains lighting controller in one dayHow a 1.5k-line Python generator (own s-expression parser, pcbnew placement, freerouting, kicad-cli) produced a KiCad 10 project for a 220 V lighting controller with ESP32-S3, an A7682E LTE modem, 4 relays and 8 mains-sense inputs — ERC-clean, reproducible, built in a day.Hire an ESP32 firmware and hardware developer by the hour — live on ZoomESP-IDF firmware, LTE/4G modems, MQTT, ESP-NOW, KiCad boards and the server behind them — built live on a shared screen, billed per hour, first 15 minutes free. Proof: a fleet of ~18 cellular lighting controllers in production.RYTA: one web bundle for Android, PWA and a messenger mini-app, updated over the air without store releasesCase study of RYTA 3.0, a freight and machinery marketplace: a Kotlin WebView shell with a SHA-256-verified OTA bundle engine, a FastAPI backend, phone identity by inbound call, T-Bank payments and a MAX messenger bot mirroring the whole UI.A self-hosted OpenStreetMap stack for Russia and the CIS on a 2 GB VPS: PMTiles, Photon and a metered APIHow geo.ryta.online replaces Google/Yandex map APIs: 13 Geofabrik extracts into PostGIS with osm2pgsql, a ~10 GB PMTiles vector basemap served as a static file, an off-server Photon geocoder index, and a Node/Express gateway with scoped keys, quotas and paid plans.An ultra-light IP camera viewer and recorder in C: dozens of RTSP streams on a slow PCCase study of Ultralight IP CAM Viewer: a 17k-line C11 application on FFmpeg + SDL2 that shows a grid of RTSP cameras, records hourly MPEG-TS, plays back a timeline, drives ONVIF PTZ and runs on very weak hardware.
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