Here’s a picture of a lifter ideas I threw together. The cool part is that the ball is lifted almost straight up – this is a straight line approximation mechanism – without a typical elevator or chain lift. The line where the ball goes up is drawn for…
Continue readingRolling Ball Lifter #2 is done. Here’s some video and pictures of the finished product. A quick search of this blog will yield other posts about the construction process. This Rolling Ball Sculpture, Marble Run, or Kugelbahn, is mostly a mechanical ball lift. The track is minimal to…
Continue readingI was reading a bunch of funny programming related stories on a page dedicated to programing stupidities, and came across this: About four years ago, I was working on a project that, among other things, involved porting several million lines of code. While not technically real-time, the code…
Continue readingLinkage 3.4 is now available. I got rid of the Elements panel and button. You will now need to right click to insert elements into the mechanism. There are other changes mentioned in the first section of the PDF documentation and in some previous blog posts. Get it…
Continue readingI made a makeshift part to hold the far end of the on/off switch pull rod. Here’s a few pictures: Once I make the decorative part to hold the end of the rod, I’ll cut some threads in the end of the rod and screw on a steel…
Continue readingI cleaned my garage and I’m back to working on a Rolling Ball Sculpture again. My garage was figuratively knee deep in stuff and almost literally knee deep in some places. I wanted to make some room to work on projects while also uncover the climbing wall. Yes,…
Continue readingGet the Beta Linkage here! If you need this Beta program for Windows XP, send me an email and I’ll send it to you… There’s a new beta test version of the Linkage program. This new version has some bug fixes for things like the crash that sometimes…
Continue readingI’m not sure what to call them. On an actuator, there is a small circle that can be used to change the throw length. That little circle is an adjuster knob or adjustment controller or something like that. I’m working towards in-mechanism editing of cams and changing the…
Continue readingA new version is available in the usual place. I was finally able to spend the hour needed to fix the crash that happened when deleting links that were fastened to gears (or vice-versa). Version 3.3.13 has this fix. A few other changes and fixes: You can now…
Continue readingThe whole “fastening” thing is a bit troublesome for me. I originally wanted to be able to move drawing elements with links and decided to allow “fastening.” This worked pretty well, though there is a bug where deleting a fastened element somehow causes a crash. But fastening isn’t…
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