Orbiting Gears and Chain Mechanism I’m having a little trouble with the Linkage user interface. In the picture above, which is a nicely exported and scaled down JPEG image, I designed a mechanism to show an orbiting planet (gear 2) with an orbiting moon (connector F). Designing this…

Linkage 3.0 is almost ready! I had a little trouble with the math for the gear and chain simulation. For a few minutes, I had very different code for the gear simulator and the chain simulator. I soon realized that I had figured out an improvement when working…

Another Gear Demonstration

I have some of the gear simulator working. Video of Simple Gears The simple gears are self explanatory. This was the first working test. The gear size ratio is set in the coordinate/length/angle text box in the tool bar, or by pressing the Gear Ratio button below that….

Okay, the user interface is pretty much working for gears. Gears Now I need to work on the simulation. This sounds simple, but there are some issues that I still need to work out. To start with, the existing simulator does not “follow” the kinematic chain. No Simple…

The fastening feature of the Linkage program is at bit of a kludge. Or maybe not. But it is weird in my mind. The user can create a mechanism and then draw some things on the drawing layer. These drawing elements are very simplistic and still get the…

My previous post described making a link also be a gear. I realize now that this is a limitation that doesn’t need to happen. But removing that limitation causes other problems. Here is where I am with this project: A gear is a link, but not a link…

I have the user interface in the Linkage program working somewhat. I have a serious dilemma with the simplicity of it. The concepts are good, but the details are troublesome. I’ll explain. Various gear Configurations In the image above, there are four gear interface situations shown. The user…

I have a little bit of the user interface working. I took out an optimization feature where joining a lone connector to another connector would just discard the link that was part of the lone connector. Now, a lone connector might have a link that is a gear,…

I was just having a discussion with my dad about gears. Every now and then, I think about how to add gearing to the Linkage program and I think that I now have a way to do it. I’m writing down the ideas for future reference, and because…