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Back in about 2012, I started working for Westlake Software. It was a part-time side job porting an older Android app to the Windows phone. Wow was that a tough project for the first few weeks. Since then, I ported that Windows phone app to Windows, created a…
Continue readingThere are currently two ways to show links in the Linkage software: The link is drawn as a polygon using the outer-most connectors to define the shape, and drawn as a solid object with the connector circles giving the appearance of holes within a larger polygon with rounded…
Continue readingI suspect that anyone reading my blog will notice that unlike other blogs, I tend to post about things I’m going to do, not things that I’ve done. My latest interest is in neural networks. I think that I have a good grasp of how they work aside…
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 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 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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