Did you develop a Speckle Kit? Let us know! [.net/py]

Happy spring time everyone :herb: We’ve got a very geeky/developer question to ask!

If y’all remember kits: they’re an inflection point in our connector architecture allowing for swapping object models. More in the below:

Have you developed a kit? If so, please let us know!

We’re very curious to hear what pain points you solved using them, and your feedback would greatly help us shape the roadmap.

The more you can share, the more helpful - e.g., what’s the domain? how are you distributing it? How and where are you using it (eg., grasshopper/dynamo/scripts or also main connectors)? Is it an extension of our Objects kit, or is it completely independent?

As well, if you encountered the idea, but decided not to develop a kit - do let us know your thoughts too!

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@chuck I think you may have some experience on this if i recall :raised_hands:t3:

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Pinging @Rob too, who I think might have worked on something similar…

Nothing significant to share except that I found the process quite comfortable. I set out to wrap/extend the existing Rhino/Grasshopper converter to inject a little more project-specific data. The code currently makes very few changes to the existing kit. I found the process to be especially easy for this task in C# (methods to implement, base methods to call).

I had two main moments of confusion:

  • How to import this, Rhino dependencies, and then reference the library as a whole in a Rhino compute project. I don’t really blame Speckle (or Rhino) for this. I’m more or less always confused by how I’m supposed to set up Rhino compute dependencies because I don’t have a great handle on C# package references in general.
  • Some of the default graphics in the viewer were unexpected (Box is the first that came to mind). The data was always what it should be, but my use case called for more 3D. I think it’s 100% reasonable for these defaults to be what they are, though, and leave most fine-tuning to the kit creator. I haven’t spent too much time on this but so far it’s been working as expected.

Overall, v would recommend to a friend. Had to really dig for something to say.

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