Question to all you people running Works OS / Works Manager

Let’s start with Works Manager - what issues are you guys all having with sending data from TBC to Works Manager for use in Earthworks Machines. Please provide specific details that you know, you are pretty sure or you think you know the answers to. We will see what we can do to assist you here as this has likely been going on a while for most of you.

Object Types Supported by Earthworks

Polygons

Our new EW polygons command should provide the means to create these correctly for Machine Control using Earthworks. The shaded polygons will shade the surfaces in Earthworks for the operator to show different areas / aspects of a project in color on screen.

Alignments

Not sure if Station Equations is still an issue for Earthworks or not. Does anyone know the answer to that question. Are there any other issues that you know of that are causing you problems

Linework

I have heard that some of the VPI types in TBC can cause problems in VCL outputs e.g. Inbound Slope, Outbound Slope, Slope Slope, Vertical Curve and even I have heard VPIs vs 3D nodes. What is the desired solution for linework for Earthworks? What other issues have you encountered.

If you select e.g. Contour Lines, they may be dependent on a surface so you want to break that dependency

Surface Models

Biggest issues I hear are to do with VCLs carrying all the dependent objects of a surface i.e. Source Data. Contours and potentially other surfaces vs supplying “Dumb TIN” models - people tell me that they create a TTM out and then reimport it for Machine Use. Is the desired scenario that you have a create Machine Surface File function, pick one or more surfaces and then just create an MC-XXX where XXX is the source surface name, that has just a TIN Model. We can likely do this in our upcoming Smart Model command and create a Surface Group for Machine / Field Models and then just make a copy of surfaces selected as Machine Models that are just a TBC Internal Surface with no source data or dependent objects.

Coordinate Systems

Is there anything in here to be aware of

Image Files e.g. for Works Manager or Siteworks

Publishing Images with World Files that are below the size threshold for Siteworks in an automated way and prepping the images also for Works Manager / Works OS - is there a preferred format like PNG or JPG or TIF - TIF and PNG have transparency whereas JPG does not - So I would say PNG are the best.

Also if we publish sheets from referenced PDF Pages do you want the whole PDF page probably easier as the publish process needs a plotbox for the area to publish and we could likely create that automatically for each sheet based on the Sheet dimensions that we know at Georeference time.

Any other issues that you know about.

Please capture any other issues that you have seen / heard about so we have a definitive list to work with here and we will see what we can do over the next few months to ease up this bottleneck that does not appear to be getting addressed on the TBC side.

If we solve this, we will likely create a Toolbox of tools for managing data for the field that will not be a part of the All Tools package. This is likely a significant chunk of work for us, that provides little overall value add to what we are trying to do other than supporting you our users better - so we will likely need to charge something additional to recoup the development expenses of these tools. Let me know your opinion of this, the alternative is that All Tools goes up in price if we have to include this element with our standard packaging. If we can slot functions into other tools, the tools are more likely to be in All Tools so we will see where this ends up.

You have a couple of weeks to respond here to us if you want us to do something for you around this,

Please prioritize what you see as the biggest pain points.

Alan

Alan: I am not sure that I should be chiming in here as I gave up on Works Manager. After hearing/reading the constant issues which seem to go unaddressed by the big T, coupled with my Sitech rep telling me that if I had another option don’t use WM, I said to heck with it. I didn’t want to spend any more time troubleshooting another Trimble product.

It seems to me that taking on a project like this might dilute the attention you and your team spend making TBC more useful. Unless, as a company, you could financially justify adding a coder (or more?) that dealt exclusively with WM that your focus would be diverted. In spite of your incredibly admirable, well-meaning desire to serve your customers taking this on might really detract from your keen focus on TBC. I am not trying to be a naysayer but I have learned painfully that you can’t be all things to all people.

Again, I don’t want to sound negative, and of course the ultimate decision is up to you and your team. There isn’t a person who uses the Rockpile tools that doesn’t massively appreciate the effort, the creative thought, and the execution of your utilities that you folks have created. Whether, or not, you pursue fixing WM on the front end we all appreciate what we have in Rockpile.

Hope this isn’t ‘out of line’.
Marshall

ps when I gave up on WM I went ahead and built my own cloud server that works conceptually in a similar way to the “old” Office Synchronizer. It’s certainly not as feature-rich or as fancy as WM but it does work.

Thanks for the comments Marshall - appreciate the thought and I agree that we have to be careful what we spend time in and where we can provide real value - i have avoided field data suppprt and CAD support because while valuable to the user base, tbey are a never ending catalogue of issues that arise.

Having said that if there are some simple things we can do eg the EW Polygons command or in Smart Model if we can create a dumb TIN with no dependencies or if we can write a linestring tool maybe in Convert to Linestring that eliminates zero length segments and converts unsupported VPI types to 3D nodes - those are easy things for us to do that can help the overall process. We have already dome some things to support Siteworks Images - we just need to make that a part of a better inage tool - we are just implementing a tool that captures the Background Map Service and creates a georeferenced image so you can plot it etc. Then we slowly work through fixes to the common problems that seem to be plaguing Works Manager data flows.

I dont really understand why this is so hard to solve - most of the issues I am hearing are fairly basic issues on the face of it.

Alan

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Biggest complaint we seem to get is only being able to export VCLs instead of being able to choose dxf/ttm or vcl when using the native works os ribbon in tbc. Guys in the field seem to get annoyed having to comb their emails on the rover for machine files vs exporting from the tsc7 and apparently vcls dont allow that operation.

my biggest complaint with work os in tbc is the time it takes to open and run through the various clunky menus.