Monthly Archives

January 2020

Linkage Program

Darned Planetary Gears

I thought that the Linkage program, with the addition of external gears, would handle a planetary transmission just fine. I was wrong. Aside from the issue of having to drive this with a chain, which is necessary because making the center connector of the gear train an input…

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Linkage Program

Slider Bug in Linkage Software

I found a really weird sliding connector bug. If the connectors B and C are very very close to vertical but not quite exactly vertical, a math problem causes the mechanism to fail at a seemingly random position. In this case, I saw it fail about 3/4 of…

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Linkage Program

Linkage Internal Gears

Someone contacted me asking about planetary [internal] gears. I gave it some thought and implemented it in about 2 hours. A bunch of that time was me figuring out how to automatically find the gear radii based on just the ratio. The gear with the larger ration value…

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