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Writing software is not much different from writing a set of instructions for a spouse, friend, or employee so that they can run your errands for you. If you have a lot for that person to do, a set of instructions might look like this: Go to the…
Continue reading[Update: Scroll the update at the end to see new information about all of this] When I first wrote the Linkage software, I knew that if you rotate some points, that they can’t be rotated back to their original positions because of math and rounding issues. I immediately…
Continue readingI wrote a post on Facebook and it was sort of long. it was just some thoughts I had. I’m recreating that here because FB is not really a blog and it’s unfair to push more than 100-200 words onto people who are just browsing for kitten pictures……
Continue readingI have no idea why I put “elements” in “quotes” (or why the word “quotes” is in quotes) but it seemed to sort of make sense. I am still trying to figure out the best way to add the curve feature to the Linkage program. Since a curve,…
Continue readingI’m heading to Florida for a few days. More specifically, I’m heading to Orlando with my daughter to spend a few days at Disney World and then I’m coming home without her. It’s an emotional time for us because her four-month internship will represent the longest time she’s…
Continue readingThis is the first of hopefully many text tutorials for the Linkage Mechanism Designer and Simulator. Videos are great but a bit harder to make than this written stuff. Planetary gears are a set of gears where one gear rotates around another and another outer gear, always an…
Continue readingI 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…
Continue readingI 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…
Continue readingSomeone 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…
Continue readingI wrote the Tapestry board game simulator and added code to handle the first 4 spaces on each track. Since I was focused on resource gathering and not points, cards, etc, I opted to only write the code to handle choices relevant to that goal; I treated spaces…
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