WebGL

Roger Cheng

See World(s) Online

NASALogoOne of the longest tenure items on my “To-Do” exploration is to get the hang of the Google Earth API and learn how to create a web app around it. This was very exciting web technology when Google seemed to be moving Google Earth from a standalone application to a web-based solution. Unfortunately its web architecture was based around browser plug-ins which eventually lead to its death.

It made sense for Google Earth functionality to be folded into Google Maps, but that seemed to be a slow process of assimilation. It never occurred to me that there are other alternatives out there until I stumbled across a talk about NASA’s World Wind project. (A hands-on activity, too, with a sample project to play with.) The “Web World Wind” component of the project is a WebGL library for geo-spatial applications, which makes me excited about its potential for fun projects.

The Java edition of World Wind has (or at least used to) have functionality beyond our planet Earth. There were ways to have it display data sets from our moon or from Mars. Sadly the web edition has yet to pick up that functionality.

JPL does currently expose a lot of Mars information in a web-browser accessible form on the Mars Trek site. According to the speaker of my talk, it was not built on World Wind. He believes it was built on Cesium, another WebGL library for global data visualization.

I thought there was only Google Earth, and now I know there are at least two other alternatives. Happiness.

The speaker of the talk is currently working in the JPL Ops Lab on the OnSight project, helping planetary scientists collaborate on Mars research using Microsoft’s Hololens for virtual presence on Mars. That sounds like an awesome job.

Roger Cheng

Fusion 360 vs. Onshape: Raspberry Pi

raspberry-pi-logoAnd now for something completely silly: let’s look at how our two competing hobbyist-friendly CAD offerings fare on the hobbyist-friendly single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi.

(Spoiler: both failed.)

Raspberry Pi

I have on hand the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Featuring a far more powerful CPU than the original Pi which finally made the platform usable for basic computing tasks.

When the Raspberry Pi foundation updated its Raspbian operating system with PIXEL, they switched the default web browser from Epiphany to Chromium, the open-source fork of Google’s Chrome browser. Bringing in a mainstream HTML engine resulted in far superior compatibility with a wider range of web sites, supporting many of the latest web standards, including WebGL which is what we’ll be playing with today.

Autodesk Fusion 360

Fusion 360 is a native desktop application compiled for Windows and MacOS, so we obviously couldn’t run that on the Pi. However, there is a web component: Fusion 360 projects can be shared on the Autodesk 360 collaboration service. From there, the CAD model can be viewed in a web browser via WebGL on non-Windows/MacOS platforms.

While such files can be viewed on a desktop machine running Ubuntu and Chromium, a Raspberry Pi 3 running Chromium is not up to the task. Only about half of the menu bar and navigation controls are rendered correctly, and in the area of the screen where the actual model data should be, we get only a few nonsensical rectangles.

Onshape

Before this experiment I had occasionally worked on my Onshape projects on my desktop running Ubuntu and Chromium, so I had thought the web-based Onshape would have an advantage in Raspberry Pi Chromium. It did, just not usefully so.

In contrast to A360’s partial menu UI rendering, all of Onshape’s menu UI elements rendered correctly. Unfortunately, the actual CAD model is absent in the Raspberry Pi Chromium environment as well. We get the “Loading…” circle and it was never replaced by the CAD model.

Conclusion

Sorry, everyone, you can’t build a web-based CAD workstation with a $35 Raspberry Pi 3.

You can, however, use these WebGL sites as a stress test of the Raspberry Pi. I had three different ways of powering my Pi and this experiment proved enlightening.

  1. A Belkin-branded 12V to 5V USB power adapter: This one delivered good steady voltage at light load, but when the workload spiked to 100% the voltage dropped low enough for the Pi to brown out and reset.
  2. A cheap Harbor Freight 12V to 5V USB adapter: This one never delivered good voltage. Even at light load, the Pi would occasionally flash the low-voltage warning icon, but never low enough to trigger a reboot. When the workload spiked to 100%, the voltage is still poor but also never dropped enough to trigger a reset. Hurray for consistent mediocrity!
  3. An wall outlet AC to 5V DC power unit (specifically advertised to support the Raspberry Pi) worked as advertised – no low-voltage warnings and no resets.