Linkage Program

The Linkage program lets the user add linear actuators to a mechanism. These are drawn a little bit like a hydraulic cylinder or a similar motorized linear actuator. Simple Linear Actuator There is an interesting issue with these actuators. Actually, there is a bug in how the actuator…

I have been using a screen capture utility to create animations from my linkage mechanism simulator. It worked ok but creating the animation directly is a better choice. Fortunately, Windows provides all of the tools necessary to add this directly into the program. I added a Save Video…

I am adding an alignment feature to the Linkage program. So far, I have three ways to align connectors. Right Angle                         Before and after alignment three connectors to form a right angle. When three connectors are selected, a right angle can be made by moving the third…

I was sitting around last night and my boredom led me to implement another new feature in the Linkage program. Download the Windows installation file for the Linkage program to run it on your Windows computer. The editor now supports snapping. Snapping is when an element is being…

I recently added a new feature to the Linkage program. The new feature allows an input to be manually controlled during an animated simulation. There are currently four types of simulations: Animated Simulation The simulation is run in real time and the animation of the moving mechanism is…

I found this animation of a simulator on the web. It came from http://gtrebaol.free.fr/doc/flash/four_bar/doc/. The interesting thing about it is the little twist that happens during the simulation. I quickly created a version of this mechanism using my Linkage editor/simulator program and found that I could not make…

I had not looked for other linkage programs in a long time even though I’ve been writing my own for the past ten years (Linkage 2.0). The last time I looked, I was interested in getting one and I only looked for things that are free. A new…

I have uploaded a new linkage install package. This incorporates all of the latest features. I think that all of the versions of Linkage in the last year can only run on Windows Vista or Windows 7. This latest installer checks the Windows version to keep the program…

The linear actuators are working and the backhoe mechanism is now an included sample.

I finally got around to finding and fixing a few tiny things. The biggest fix was to the code for sliding links. A sliding link is a link that has two sliders that make it move along a specific linear path. I had code to handle the case…