Many programming books start out with a chapter called “Hello World” or at least a section of the chapter where the programming itself is being taught. After installing text editors, compilers, etc., a program must be written that does something visible, and so, the “hello world” program is…
Continue readingWriting software is not much different from writing a set of instructions for a spouse, friend, or employee so that they can run your errands for you. If you have a lot for that person to do, a set of instructions might look like this: Go to the…
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 wrote a post on Facebook and it was sort of long. it was just some thoughts I had. I’m recreating that here because FB is not really a blog and it’s unfair to push more than 100-200 words onto people who are just browsing for kitten pictures……
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 readingI’m heading to Florida for a few days. More specifically, I’m heading to Orlando with my daughter to spend a few days at Disney World and then I’m coming home without her. It’s an emotional time for us because her four-month internship will represent the longest time she’s…
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…
Continue readingSomeone contacted me asking about planetary [internal] gears. I gave it some thought and implemented it in about 2 hours. A bunch of that time was me figuring out how to automatically find the gear radii based on just the ratio. The gear with the larger ration value…
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