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I threw together this bridge after seeing some others on YouTube. I started with actuators in place of winches and cables and then moved to an actuator that would be a hydraulic cylinder or rack-and-pinion if built in real life. I’ll try to update this post with the…
Continue readingThe rolling bridge in Paddington London is a prime mechanism to reverse engineer and create with the Linkage software. This is a simple repeating mechanism that uses the vertically-oriented hydraulics to decrease the distance between the top portions of the individual trapezoids. The distance decreases as the center…
Continue readingI just updated the Linkage program beta version here: https://www.rectorsquid.com/beta/linkage.msi This is a 64-bit Windows desktop program. Contact me to get the beta for Windows XP. I won’t be able to keep updated the Windows XP version forever since Microsoft is probably going to make the build tools…
Continue readingThere is a new Beta test version of the Linkage software: https://www.rectorsquid.com/beta/linkage.msi The only significant difference from the previous version is a fix to keep the color of drawing elements when copying and pasting. Drawing elements might have also lost their color when saving files but I didn’t…
Continue readingin·tu·i·tive in-too-i-tivadjectiveusing or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive. I was told recently that the Linkage software was convoluted and not intuitive. This subjective opinion is perfectly valid and I cannot argue against it. I could probably compare the complexity of…
Continue readingA new version of Linkage is available to test: http://www.rectorsquid.com/beta/linkage.msi This is version 3.15 or greater. It will get updated as I fix more bugs and tweak more features. Here are some recent changes, some of which might have already been released in previous versions: The control knobs…
Continue readingI’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 readingBack 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…
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