Mondays are perfect for making videos.

On Saturdays though, you find the right problems to solve.

Last Saturday, at around noon, I asked my friend Konrad Sobon in New York City if he had ever considered looking at the old Door Swing problem in Revit with Python, API and Dynamo eyes. Later the same day (I think it was Labor Day in the US) he uploaded a small Custom Node to his website archi-lab (archi-lab.net). I’ve been waiting since then to test and break it, but apart from a small bug that prevents me from using the Categories node in Dynamo (this is not Konrad’s fault), it works fantastically well! Hard as stone – impossible to break!

Until we can bake Dynamo definitions inside Revit families, the way to use this is the same as most other addins: Run before you QA your documentation. (Striking double meaning there.)

Documenting Door Swing and Handing Direction has been a lacking OTB functionality in Revit for a very long time. Architects who needed to handle this had two choices: Do it manually (suicide!!!) or buy addins. Many of these addins have worked extremely well, but now you can do it yourself. For free.

This is another example of how building designers, with a little help from people with programming skills, can start designing their own software, and share it with the rest of the world.