Computers & Programming

… or How I added something rather unimportant to the Linkage program but had to blog about it just to make a blog entry today. The Microsoft Ribbon Bar, which is just a toolbar designed to completely replace the program menu and toolbars, has an interesting feature that…

I went ahead and separated the View pane in the ribbon bar from the new Dimensions pane in the Linkage program. I am not sure how to label the “show dimensions” check box. Since it is in the Dimensions pane, I can’t really call it “dimensions.” What I…

I threw in a quick little feature to make the display of solid links more interesting. Solid Links The links with three connectors are drawn a little larger than the two-connector links. It would have been cool if I could figure out how the links all connected and…

Even though I could have used arbitrary units of measurement for displaying dimensions of parts, that would not have allowed the user the ability to switch units without then enlarging or shrinking their mechanism to get that change. For instance, the user makes something that is 10.000 units…

I am making good progress on the measurement/dimensions code for the Linkage program. All Things Measured The measurement feature is fully automatic. Enabling this by checking the Dimensions check box in the toolbar shows the measurements. Things that are noteworthy at the moment Anchor measurements are based on…

I was bored and added a fixed size video capture area. The area is centered in the window, even if the window is smaller than the video resolution, and the user can opt to show or hide a box around the area. Video Area The video is only…

Jansen Mechanism with Measurements I have added a simple “show all” dimensioning, or measurement, feature to the Linkage program. This was interesting because I wanted to automatically decide how to show measurements for links with three or more connectors. For a link with three or more connectors, the…

It took me a few minutes to figure out the difference between Escapement and Orientation when using the CreateFont() function. Actually, it took me about 2 seconds to figure it out once I had seem discussion about it and heard about people trying to create some sort of…

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…