Testing Drawing Features I am planning on a big feature addition to the Linkage program. The new drawing feature will allow a user to draw points, lines, and polygons, as non-functioning elements in their mechanism. These are essentially drawing elements that have no effect on the simulated mechanism…

I think that I am getting closer and closer to having a useable solution to the link positioning problem (blog post 1, blog post 2 ). This new idea is based mostly on the last one. The idea was to use points on circles to narrow down the…

In my previous blog post, about Computing the Position of a Triangle Based on Distances From External Points to Each Corner, I came up with a potential method of simulating a three link connection to a three connector link. Computing the Position of a Triangle Based on Distances…

? Linkage I don’t know if there is a name for this type of linkage. The green triangle link in the image above has a position (location and orientation) defined by the three ground connections and the lengths of the three connecting links. A search for equations to…

  Upon further inspection, A Stephenson value gear mechanism cannot be built with the Linkage program. I don’t have the necessary simulation code to handle the complexity of the links. The problem comes from the connection of the “Link” to the rest of the mechanism. The position of…

A user asked me about curved links in the Linkage program. I think that it is safe to say that curved slider paths is the desired feature because the visual representation of a link is fairly meaningless. It is the connectors that matter. Straight Sliding Connector The straight…

Computer monitors, the old CRT kind, scan from top to bottom like a TV. Before computers, that didn’t cause any problems but when people started accessing the screen, a new coordinate system (variation) was born. It was the “inverted” Cartesian coordinate system. Well, I don’t think that there…

It turns out that moving the sample gallery into the main menu was only a little bit troublesome and only took an hour for me to figure out how to fix. The problem appeared to be that the MFC code created a new gallery window of some sort…

The setup program now works correctly to update the Linkage program. It turns out that there are a few more manual steps I need to take when creating the installer (MSI file) so that an update actually updates the linkage.exe executable file. Microsoft really dropped the ball when…

I was contacted by a very helpful person who tried the Linkage program and had some very good suggestions. I fixed a few bugs and then implemented a few of the less complicated features that we discussed. Fixed a problem where I had added , and . shortcut…