Vertical blinds design

Marius Mihalca — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:58:12 GMT

One day I had a meeting with one important customer. We were talking about one of our product (Ra Workshop - software for windows and doors) and he was complaining that we spend too much time o details and to cover peculiar features while the window industry has some simple need. While talking he challenged me asking what changes have to be made in order for our software to compute vertical blinds. It was the first time I heard this request but it took me about 30 seconds to realize that he's request is perfectly possible using the current release.

From some point of view the vertical blinds are similar, by the way that are computed, to louvers and Ra Workshop is able to compute all types of louvers. So, here is how you can use Ra Workshop to design vertical blinds (You should know that at the time I am writing this article I don't have any real data for vertical blinds and I had to use some existing profile system data to simulate this).

So let's assume that we have a database with a sliding frame (the top element where the vertical blinds will slide) and some vertical fabrics with different textures and colors.

The first thing is to define a surface where the vertical blinds will be placed. In order to do that we will add a frame having as a profile the element that we've defined earlier. As we already know you will only need the profile on the top part so remove it from the left, right and bottom site. Now we have to add the vertical blinds. This is similar to adding a louver to a window. O course louvers are placed horizontally, but Ra Workshop is flexible and gives you the possibility to place the fabrics vertically. You can let Ra Workshop to compute the number of vertical blinds, based on their width or you can specify the exact number of vertical fabrics that you want.

Here are two examples of vertical blinds drawings (one with a fixed number of elements and one computed by the Ra Workshop).

Once we've designed the vertical blinds you can generate all the reports that the application is able to create. Here is how the client offer looks like:

Hope this article helps you understanding the flexibility of Ra Workshop and also are an workaround to design vertical blinds.

If you have any suggestion about topics that I could talk about please use the forum to tell me.

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Vertical blinds design