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I’m about ready to turn the Beta Linkage program into the official production version. The only problem is that I still want to do more work on it. It feels incomplete if it can’t move a cam to make it meet a follower. In other words, the follower…
Continue readingThanks to a user, I fixed a few bugs in the spline/cam simulation code. Splines that are not fastened to a link or connector are now treated as part of the “ground” and can be used as cam-like shapes without producing simulation errors. Speaking of connectors; a cam…
Continue readingI had a running error, or something like that, in the Linkage program. I had targeted 30 frames per second for animations and I used a 33 millisecond target time for each frame. If a frame took less than 33 milliseconds to compute and draw, I would add…
Continue readingI exchanged emails with a nice guy who was interested in the Linkage program. He had some useful feedback and also some suggestions and comments about an issue I had with triads. A triad, as I use the term, is a link with at least three link connections…
Continue readingI am not a mechanical engineer but one thing I understand is ambiguity in linkages. It may be because I have a brain that is good at analyzing mechanical connections or because so many people send me mechanisms asking “why doesn’t this work?” Either way, it’s fairly easy…
Continue readingI’ve been torn on changing the test software from using splines as a sort of decoration on links into actual links themselves. There is no reason to drop in a spline as a drawing element then add a slider to it to turn it into a cam when…
Continue readingWhen I implemented the gear feature in the Linkage software, I decided to make the gears be links. This was mostly hidden and whenever a gear needed to turn a crank or be turned by a crank, I opted to have the user “fasten” the gear to the…
Continue readingThe spline and cam features are working in the Linkage software. Above is a video with my first attempt at a tutorial. Since I haven’t used the software to create splines and cams much, I stutter and pause a bit while thinking about what to do next. It’s…
Continue readingAfter many more hours of work, I have a complete polyline editor. Each segment can be a Bezier curve or a straight line. Each node can be a cusp or have the control points smooth and optionally symmetrical. Nodes can be added and deleted and the curve can…
Continue readingI did some work this week on the cam feature for the Linkage program. Cams are found in many places including in car engines – they open and close the valves – and in many industrial machines. Car engine cams are all based on a similar shape and…
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