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I’m working on the Linkage program and I am having trouble solving a problem; I have three classes that need bases classes to simplify their definitions and construction. The classes can be described as Control Knobs, Connectors, and Links. In the code itself, things like drawing elements are…
Continue readingFor a little while last night, I worked on the Linkage program. I’m trying to report errors in mechanisms without marking every single element as broke. In the picture above, the inputs are the wrong length or on the wrong place and the mechanism binds. What I intend…
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 readingA new Beta Linkage program is here (click this text). In the above video, you can see two links rotating in circles and always overlapping. Each link has three connectors, one at each end and one in the middle. I added a three connector link near the intersection…
Continue readingIn the “production” version of the Linkage software, it is possible to select a circle and then “grab” the small round “control knob” and adjust the circle radius with the mouse. It works this way for the linear actuators too. In the old days, only the actuators had…
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…
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