It’s been a long time since my last post and I’m hoping this post is the beginning of ending the dry spell, but I’m not making any promises . It’s been a very busy past year. Professionally, It began by transferring from the Inventor development team into the ADN group that supports developers using the the API’s of all of the various Autodesk products. As part of that transfer I was hoping to be able to spend more time with you and others that are using the API’s to make the Autodesk products better. Soon after this transition I was loaned back to the development group but this time I’m working with the Fusion development team to help with the design of the Fusion API.
Earlier this week a new version of Fusion 360 was released and it contains a preview of the API (Application Programming Interface) we’ve been working on. It’s rare that any off-the-shelf product will do everything you need it to do in the way you would like it to. This applies to Fusion too but now by writing scripts that use the new API, you can drive Fusion to automate repetitive tasks and create new capabilities.
This release of the API is a preview so there’s still a lot that we need to do but there is also quite a bit of functionality as you can see demonstrated in the picture above. If you have Fusion installed you have access to the functionality and can try running some of the samples and look at the documentation. The API documentation is available on the web along with all of the Fusion product help, as shown below.
The Fusion 360 API User’s Manual contains some overview documents to help get you started and there are some sample programs that are part of help and also some that are delivered with Fusion. The available programs, or scripts, are accessible through the Scripts Manager, as shown below.
We would very much like to hear your comments about the API, both about what’s in this preview release and what functionality you would like to see exposed next in upcoming releases.
-Brian