TSS Clokit®

With this option you can design a clothoid curve between two entities . You will be asked to pick/specify the two entities on the drawing. There is no need to specify any other clothoid parameter such as clothoid length (L) or A parameter value, CloKit®™ will perform all necessary calculations.

On TSS ribbon, click the [Clothoid] → [Two Entities] button or type “tss_clokit_twoentities” at Autodesk® AutoCAD® command line. CloKit®™ will ask you to select the first and then the second entity from the active drawing. After the successful selection of the two entities, CloKit®™ will draw the calculated clothoid and will write its parameters at the command line.

With this option you can draw a Clothoid either between a straight part and an arc or between two arcs (with different radius-take care on the  special requirements on egg clothoids).

With this option you can design a clothoid curve between two entities . You will be asked to pick/specify the two entities on the drawing. There is no need to specify any other clothoid parameter such as clothoid length (L) or A parameter value, CloKit®™ will perform all necessary calculations.

On TSS ribbon, click the [Clothoid] → [Two Entities] button or type “tss_clokit_twoentities” at Autodesk® AutoCAD® command line. CloKit®™ will ask you to select the first and then the second entity from the active drawing. After the successful selection of the two entities, CloKit®™ will draw the calculated clothoid and will write its parameters at the command line.

With this option you can draw a Clothoid either between a straight part and an arc or between two arcs (with different radius-take care on the  special requirements on egg clothoids).

With this option you can design a clothoid at the end of an existing entity in AutoCAD®.

Any Clothoid is defined by a set of two parameters of the (1) Length, (2) Radius or (3) A-parameter.

Click the [Clothoid] → [One Entity, A parameter, Radius, Length] button on TSS ribbon or type “tss_clokit_oneentityARL” at AutoCAD® command line.

CloKit®™ will ask you to select an entity, to which the clothoid will be attached. Then you will be prompted to define the two parameters required for the clothoid’s calculation. After the successful definition of clothoid’s design parameters, CloKit®™ will finally request from you to select a side i.e., to click on a point in your active drawing so as to define the curvature direction and the start point of the clothoid.

CloKit®™ gives you the possibility to offset a clothoid by specifying an offset distance. This means that you can create a new clothoid which is calculated by offsetting the adjacent elements (the line segment – arc segment in case of simple clothoid or the two arc segments in case of egg-shaped clothoid) of the original clothoid by the given distance and then calculate a clothoid that will fit between these new offset entities. Of course the user will never see the other offset entities except for the newly crated clothoid.

To offset a clothoid made with CloKit®™ click on [Offset] button on TSS ribbon or type “tss_clokit_offset” at Autodesk® AutoCAD® command line. CloKit®™ will ask you to select a clothoid to offset and then to specify the offset distance. Finally, CloKit®™ will request from you to select a side by clicking on a point in your drawing, in order to define whether the new clothoid is to be offset inside or outside of the original selected clothoid.

Another, very useful capability that comes with CloKit®™, besides creating and modifying a clothoid, is the detection of a clothoid.

This tool allows you to investigate whether a polyline drawn in Autodesk® AutoCAD®, that may have been created or/and imported by another specialized program (other than CloKit®™), is the representation of a clothoid.

Press the [Detect] button on TSS ribbon or type “tss_clokit_detect” and CloKit®™ will ask you to select an entity from the active drawing. After the successful selection of an entity (preferably a polyline), CloKit®™ will do the following actions:

1. perform an analysis of the selected entity (polyline) and will try to specify the parts before and after the supposed clothoid part,

2. will calculate many different alternative clothoid curves that best fit between the two adjacent parts,

3. compare the calculated proposed Clothoid curves with the selected entity.

If the selected entity is a clothoid, you are able to extract its parameters and add the calculated clothoid by CloKit®™ in your active drawing. By adding the CloKit®™ clothoid in your drawing, you can take advantage of all the tools offered by this plugin.

CloKit®™ gives you the ability to extract the design parameters of all clothoid curves that have been designed or verified by CloKit®™ and write these parameters in a table format in the active drawing.

Click on [Get Parameters] button on TSS ribbon or type “tss_clokit_getparameters” at Autodesk® AutoCAD® command line.

CloKit®™ will ask you to select an entity from the model space.

The selected entity must be a clothoid (polyline) made with CloKit®™.

Then, you will be asked to specify an insertion point and a scale factor for the clothoid data table.

This command draws the geometric data of a clothoid created with CloKit®™.

Click on [Draw Geometric Data] button on TSS ribbon or type “tss_clokit_drawgeometricdata” at Autodesk® AutoCAD® command line.

CloKit®™ will ask you to select a clothoid from the model space of the active drawing and then, if the selected entity is a CloKit®™ clothoid, it will add a block reference containing all the entities required (lines, circles, texts, dimensions) to visualize the geometric data of the selected clothoid.

In order to access the settings form to adjust and customize the CloKit® settings, you can either press the [Settings] button on the ribbon or type “tss_clokit_settings” on command line. Settings contain calculation and design parameters for clothoids, such as density of vertices, vertex accuracy, text height of clothoids data table, clothoid’s color etc. In the picture you can see the default CloKit®™ settings.