You Can’t Flip the Ground
Solesca needed CAD's most famous widget: the ViewCube, the little cube that's lived in AutoCAD's corner since 2008. Copying it would've been easy, but CAD tools orbit machine parts, and parts flip upside down all the time. The ground doesn't. That one difference drove all twenty-five decisions below.
The cube on the right is live, so grab it. As you scroll, it builds itself, one decision at a time.
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“Make me the AutoCAD cube.”
Our engineers came from CAD and wanted the cube their hands already knew, plus a compass, because solar lives and dies by bearing, the compass direction everything faces. I'd never designed one, so day one was the good kind of homework: the 2008 paper, AutoCAD's docs, every competitor's corner widget.
The brief: CAD precision, in a product a salesperson would find beautiful.
The ground has an up.
AutoCAD lets you flip a bracket upside down all day, but a solar site isn't a bracket. So the world stays upright, the camera never goes below the horizon, and the cube's bottom face is disabled. AutoCAD ships 26 views; we kept 17.
Seventeen views means walls where the other nine used to be, and a wall that stops you dead feels like a bug. So ours gives a little: drag the cube below the horizon and it slides, glows, and springs back when you let go. Watch the ghost cursor run the move, then try it yourself.
A cube with holes has no weight.
Everything we ship has rounded corners, so the first cube rounded every face the way we round buttons, and it floated like a sticker: the gaps between the faces read as holes. Inset plates on a square shell got closer, but now it looked like a keycap. What worked was rebuilding it as one solid block with filleted edges, like something machined.
That's the morph you just watched, and both rejects are parked beside it for comparison.
Exact, or absent.
At a straight-on view, four arrows appear around the cube, and each click moves the camera to the neighboring side. The cube is stepping through that loop now. We kept this from CAD because face-on views are where precise work happens: looking straight at a side kills perspective distortion, so lines stay parallel, gaps read true, and the screen behaves like a drawing instead of a photo.
Only exactly face-on counts. From a view that's almost straight, "one step to the neighbor" would be a guess about where you're looking, and we'd rather hide the arrows than guess.
The house button in the corner takes you back to the default top-down view in one click, from anywhere, and the arrows come back with it.
Hover plays the move first.
Jumping the camera is disorienting: one click and you're somewhere else, working out where you are now. So hovering an arrow previews the move. The camera leans a few degrees toward where the click would take you, the target face lights up, and moving away settles everything back. The cube is cycling through all four peeks, and you can hover one yourself.
Underneath, the peek and the click ask the same piece of code where to go, so the preview always matches where you land.
We fly you around the site.
You've lined up with a roof edge at bearing 217°, the angle where the panel rows look straight, and now you want the other side of the building. Snapping to N, E, S or W would throw your 217 away.
The quarter turn keeps it: one click orbits the camera exactly 90° around the site, so 217 becomes 307 and your alignment survives.
AutoCAD's button at this spot is a roll arrow: it spins the drawing flat on the screen, choosing which way is up on paper. That's a free choice for a bracket, which has no true up. A site has exactly one, and rolling tilts the horizon into seasickness. So we kept the 90° click and changed its axis. That's the two-button capsule clicking away on the right; tap once, or hold to orbit.
Twenty-five decisions later.
The cube beside this text is the shipped build, running live. Drag it and you'll feel the snap as it nears a preset view, the rubber band when you pull below the horizon, and the quarter turn waiting in the capsule on the right.
It took three days, which I could not have done alone even a year ago. An AI pair built every version and wrote all of the projection math, which left almost all of my time for the part I love: deciding. The model knew this widget from twenty years of CAD tools. It didn't know the ground, and the ground is where every hard call in this story lived.
The cube was built for Solesca, and this page is its first public outing. If you scrolled all the way down here, thank you. Writing it up with the cube itself running beside the words was ridiculous fun, and I hope some of that came through.
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