Blog

Hackathon Wrap-Up!

The first-ever Speckle hackathon came to an end this past weekend with 90 participants from 26 different countries of the world! Over the course of 3 coffee-fuelled days, our talented hackers utilized Speckle's APIs and SDKs to come up with a total of 13 mind-blowing applications.

We are hiring!

There's been a lot going on in the Speckleverse the past few weeks! From our successful seed round [https://speckle.systems/blog/growing-the-speckle-seed/], community stand-ups [https://speckle.community/], and virtual hackathons [https://hack.speckle.dev/], to growing our distributed team globally & all things open source in between - it's been a lot of fun, to say the least! At Speckle, we are delighted to see our team scale, as we continue to enable anyone working in 3D to evolve digitally

We stand with Ukraine 💙💛

It’s already been more than two months since Russian troops have invaded Ukraine, as the war continues to unfold we want to share a quick message with our community.

Speckle now available for Mac!

We know this news has been a long time coming, so we can't be more excited to announce that we're finally releasing some of our Grasshopper connectors for Mac, available for direct install through the Speckle Manager.

Speckle 2.5.0 Released!

Numerous bug fixes and quality of life improvements. We keep going - you just need to keep the feedback coming!

Devops at Speckle pt. 2

The one about building stuff Welcome back, this is the second part in our DevOps series. If you made the serious mistake of not reading the first post, head over here [https://speckle.systems/blog/devops-speckle/], before continuing with this one. Recap In the first post we’ve talked about some high level DevOps concepts and what they mean to us. In this article we’re going to deep dive into the topic of continuous integration. What is continuous integration? As with all things DevOps its a s

Growing The Speckle Seed

Raising a seed round is much more than just the money: it's the people that matter, as their experience and passion for open source are key to Speckle's success!

Exciting: Blender Sverchok Nodes for Speckle (coming soon)

We are so excited about this that we felt we can write a blog post already :) Thanks to Prof. Wassim Jabi (@topologicBIM [https://twitter.com/topologicBIM/]) and J. Staub [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-staub-0602b42/] (Ripcord Engineering), we're going to soon see some node-based Speckle fun in Sverchok, Blender's visual programming environment. > Topologic can now communicate with @SpeckleSystems [https://twitter.com/SpeckleSystems?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] from within sverchok. I know they hav

CSI Products Alpha Release

Completing the bundle, we now have connectors the rest of the CSI family. Send and recieve data in SAP2000, SAFE, and CSiBridge easily and manipulate it to your workflow.

INTO THE SPECKLEVERSE

We are hosting a virtual hackathon, over three days teams from all over the world will get together online and hack something cool with Speckle.

Devops at Speckle

Update You can find the next posts of the series here: * The one about building and testing stuff [https://speckle.systems/blog/devops-at-speckle-pt-2/] A bit of intro This is part one of a 5 part blog post series, where we are going to walk through what the umbrella topic of DevOps means to us at the Speckle core team. Also we’ll take a look at how we apply these practices in the real world to build, deploy, update and manage the 15+ Speckle servers we currently maintain. So why should y

2.4.0 🦗 Grasshopper new and upcoming features

We're back with some news on our latest version 2.4.0 Grasshopper release! Stay tuned for a rundown of the cool Grasshopper features we introduced and a glimpse of what you'll be seeing in the upcoming 2.5.0 version as well 😎

Workshop: BIM without BIM @ CAADRIA, Sydney

BIM without BIM: learn how to use Speckle to create a connected - and automated - workflow to deliver geometry and analytical data in a workshop by the CoDe team at Aurecon.

Speckle 2.4.0 Changes - Enhanced Material Support

Here at Speckle, we have been busy over the past month, preparing a series of changes that have huge impact for Arch-viz workflows. With the release of 2.4.0, most of our connectors have received some ❤️ in the render material department. We have extended our support for receiving geometry with materials in Rhino, Revit, AutoCAD, and enhanced our support for sending Revit and Unity elements with materials. Even better, built elements such as Walls, Roofs, and Beams, now can have multiple mat

Our Mission and Values

We’ve just returned from a retreat in Barcelona, and had a chance to articulate our shared mission and values in writing.

Tekla Structures Alpha Release

It is with the greatest pleasure that the Speckle team is releasing an Tekla Structures connector for Speckle.  The release of this connector will enable BIM technicians in the AEC industry to be connected with the Speckle world 🥳. This tool is currently in alpha release, which means that you can start using it with limited features but it should be enough to support a fully automated workflow of building some of your models parametrically in Tekla Structures using grasshopper and receiving so

AEC Tech Masterclass: building your first full stack Speckle web application

In November of last year, Speckle gave a masterclass for Thornton Tomasetti's AEC Tech event [https://www.thorntontomasetti.com/event/aectech-2021-nyc]: three hours of unadulterated web app development for visualizing changes in 3D model geometry. Armed with a python backend, Vue.js frontend, and the specklepy SDK, we outlined a workshop to demonstrate how quick and easy it is to build interactive apps that leverage the model data you send to Speckle. ::: tip Want to test this out live? Send

2021 Speckle Review

2021 has been a crazy but really amazing year for Speckle the product, the company and the wider community behind it. The last 12 months have flown by and all the achievements and milestones we have reached deserve some time to be properly acknowledged.

Bentley Connectors Alpha Release

Hello Speckle world! After an amazing effort by the team at Arup, we're releasing an alpha version of four brand new connectors 💥: * MicroStation * OpenBuildings * OpenRail * OpenRoads These connectors are developed and maintained by Arup, now also available for installation through Manager [https://speckle.guide/user/manager.html]. The connectors currently support most basic geometry conversions from Microstation, with (major emphasis) very limited additional conversions in OpenBui

New features for Speckle server admins

Hey there Speckle server administrators! To make your life a bit easier, we've just added two new panels to the server administration page. One that lets you batch send server invites, and another, that helps with server user management.

Retreat Hackathon: Point cloud ML App

Hello world! The Speckle team spent a lovely week in Tuscany for a company retreat, and par for the course was a 1-day hackathon where many of us met and coded with each other in person for the first time 🙌 (confirmed: no deep fakes among us). We split into two groups, and Cristi, Reynold, and I (Claire) set up camp under our retreat gazebo to build a machine learning app that generates 3D point clouds from uploaded photos. Our underlying pitch was a simple one: we wanted to test how quickly a

Introducing Webhooks

Webhooks allow third party app developers to tune in to the event feed from a Speckle Server. This enables you to build systems that trigger custom workflows whenever data is pushed to a Speckle Stream. For example, you could build an application that for each commit created creates a cost estimate of the building and inform the user in real time of their design's value performance. Alternatively, you could run a workflow that identifies all the steel beams and produces a Bill of Materials read

Announcing Our Tutorials Portal!

We know how frustrating it can be getting started with new software when there's no documentation or tutorials around!

Become a Speckle Tester!

Have a say on the latest upcoming features before they are made publicly available and help us discover bugs!

Introducing Stream Global Variables

You might have already noticed on the web or from our docs, but Claire and I worked on a new feature that you might find useful! You can now easily store project info, design values, notes, or any other general info alongside your geometry with Globals. On the web, you’ll find the “Globals” button in the sidebar of any stream you have write access to. This will pop you into the editor which will let you build and structure your globals however you fancy. The globals are effectively stored on a

Speckle and IFC.js Team Up

Open source works: teaming up IFC.JS team for delivering future IFC parsing functionality to Speckle!

Upgrade your old Speckle GH nodes

If you are a Grasshopper user, you may have noticed that on our latest Grasshopper Connector release, there's a new version of all the Object Management nodes. This is due to the fact that the new nodes are Task Capable Components, fixing an issue in the previous version that caused the components to get stuck in a loop (see this issue [https://github.com/specklesystems/speckle-sharp/issues/539] for more details and kudos to @iltabe [https://github.com/iltabe] for catching it!). They now even

Embed your Speckle models anywhere!

Great news everyone! You can now embed your public 3D models in other documents. This below is a sample Grasshopper model from this stream [https://speckle.xyz/streams/a632e7a784], loaded up in the Speckle Viewer! > Note, if you're on Chrome in incognito mode, you might need to allow third party cookies. Click on the 👁 button in the top right corner of the address bar to change that setting! Other web technologies allow you to create documents in which data and code are interspersed with t

One Click Speckle Servers

Easier Speckle Server deployments for testing and development purposes.

LeaDE: Ensuring Valid BIM Data

LeaDE is a BIM application built by ekkodale on top of Speckle. We thought it would be exciting to share it more widely - it's a great example of what you can achieve by building on top of Speckle's APIs.

SpecklePy Tutorial: A Simple Dashboard

Learn how to get started with SpecklePy - the Python SDK for Speckle! In this tutorial, we'll be receiving geometry from a stream, updating the data, and using it to do some calculations and simple plots for a dashboard using Plotly and Dash.

Speckle In Research: Design Transactions Book

Dimitrie's research on Speckle is featured in a new open access book published by UCL Press, Design Transactions. If you are curious about the context, research, and methodology underpinning Speckle, it's definitively worth browsing! Read more for download details.

Using Speckle for MEP Workflows

A semi-automated MEP example workflow for going from design brief to design report in under 3 minutes!

How we automated releases of Speckle for Revit 2019, 2020 and 2021 with different versions of CefSharp

The Revit API hasn’t changed much across their 2019, 2020 and 2021 releases (for better or worse 😅), but our 2019 version of Speckle for Revit still wouldn’t play nicely with the newer ones. This is because both our connector and Revit use CefSharp [https://cefsharp.github.io/], a .NET wrapper around the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) [https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef], that allows us to create pretty UI using web frameworks. While Revit 2019 is stuck with an old version of CefSha

Speckle Workshop: Cross-platform collaborative techniques for AEC

Online workshop on Speckle at IaaC's Global Summer School 2020 - apply now!

Academia

Speckle Academia is our partnership programme to help the next generation of construction technology leaders become experts in cloud-based collaboration.