I added a cool feature to the Parts List to make it draw a ground link. But I also gave the code the ability to not draw the ground link if it is redundant to an actual link in the mechanism. This new code also allowed me to now exclude ground dimensions from the normal mechanism view if the the ground dimensions are redundant there too.

image

Ground Dimensions

image

No Ground Dimensions

The second image doesn’t draw ground dimensions because the user decided to create a link between all of the anchors. Link 5 is the new link that defines the relationship of the ground connectors to each other.

This may be a bad thing since it loses some information about the relationship between the entire mechanism and the page it sits on. Well, if the rotation of the mechanism is meaningful, don’t draw that ground link. It will then get generated in the Parts List anyhow! Or better yet, add some anchors to that ground link that define the connection to some real-world thing (like the ground, truck frame, building structure, etc.).

Oh, and I also added a 400×640 resolution selection to the image export feature to make it easier to show vertically oriented mechanisms in this blog.