I decided to buy an Arduino board and some components to go with it. I have some 10-or-more-year-old servos sitting in a box from when I experimented with them directly connected to a PC so it made sense to plug them into a board plugged into the Arduino…
Continue readingI write software for a living (in case it wasn’t obvious). You can read about my job history in other posts and see that I spent 18 years using C++ in the biotech industry before my current app developer job. In those 18 years, I did sometimes write…
Continue readingLast night, I taught five other people how to play Viticulture. Here are the things that stood out: 6-plays works very well in this game. The only issues were that spaces ran out on the wake-up track and on the board filled up quite a bit. Note that…
Continue readingViticulture by Stonemaier Games is a worker placement game where players plant grapevines, harvest the grapes, make wine, and sell wine. Rules and Gameplay Summary Players in Viticulture first take turns picking a player order during the Spring season; this is their “waking” order. This fairly innovative feature…
Continue readingThe Ratio button once sat in the Dimensions panel just below the text box. I moved it a long time ago because I wanted to show text there that described the numbers shown in that text box. But I didn’t want to take up space in the toolbar…
Continue readingThe export data for motion paths now includes the speed of the connector. This is always in units per second and it’s up to the user to know what units were set when running the simulation. The initial speed is zero. Speeds are calculated using the straight line…
Continue readingGet the latest beta version here: https://www.rectorsquid.com/beta/linkage.msi Here are some of the many things in this latest test version of the Linkage software: There is a new feature for duplicating elements. It is only available using the Control+D key combination. If you move or rotate the duplicates immediately…
Continue readingCorel Draw has a feature for duplicating elements that remembers the last set of operations you do on a duplicated element and it does those again on the next duplicated element. In other words, if you press Ctrl-D and then move the duplicate item, you can press Ctrl-D…
Continue readingAnother feature that I’m “working on” in the Linkage software is mechanism synthesis. I will describe manual synthesis in the Linkage software before describing how the feature could work. Generating a four-bar mechanism requires two or three positions defined for the middle bar (the middle bar is the…
Continue readingThe most important problem to solve with any process is letting people interact with it. Software does processing; It is like a machine where you put something in at one end and something else comes out the other end. A drawing program let’s you put in mouse, pen,…
Continue reading