Notes
Notes — case studies and technical write-ups
Does Claude work with AutoCAD? What an LLM can and cannot do with a DWG fileA straight answer from someone who built the plugin: Claude cannot open a DWG in the chat window, but an agent docked inside AutoCAD 2025/2026 can read the live drawing, count blocks, audit schedules, replace text everywhere and run commands — with a confirmation dialog on every change.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.Putting a Claude agent inside FreeCAD and AutoCAD: what a CAD copilot actually needsTechnical note on FreeGAD (FreeCAD workbench, Python) and AutoGAD (AutoCAD 2025 plugin, .NET 8): the tool loop over a live document, screenshots as vision, confirmed write tools, per-document memory, dual-provider LLM clients and encrypted keys.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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