Subject:
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Geartrain Simulator
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Thu, 2 Sep 1999 15:22:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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304 times
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I am interested in a program that can read an LDraw .dat file, inventory the
gears and other rotating bits, then provide information on direction and speed
of all the mechanical elements. I have not been able to find anything like
this, but it seems it should not be *ALL* that tough.
I imagine a file that contains specific LDraw parts, how many teeth they have,
their diameters and other mechanical characteristics that can be used by the
simulator to do its work. Using this file the program should be able to work
through these steps:
1) Identify mechanical parts
2) Using the radiuses of the gears, and other knowledge about how they fit
onto axles (which could probably be treated as a 'special' gear) figure out
which pieces are interacting with one another
3) Use a motor or other piece (perhaps marked in some way in the LDraw file?)
to determine where the power comes from.
4) For each turn of the 'Power' gear, calculate how much each of the other
gears turn and in which direction.
5) Write this to a file... Or better yet, expose the information to a program
like MLCad (wink, wink) so that the motion can be rendered on screen.
As the program grew it could have specific rules for things like:
differentials, swinging pieces (bricks and axles), and reconfiguring drive
trains (i.e. one cam touches one gear during part of the rotation, another
gear later, etc). Initially, simple gear to gear and gear to axle drive
trains would be all it would do.
As a bonus, the program could let you know if your gears are making 'optimal'
contact with one another by examining the gear spacing.
I could do most of the coding myself, but will probably have a few questions
about the actual format of the LDraw .dat files. Would anyone be interested
in this? If I made the source available could somebody integrate it into some
Cad type program? Would this even be useful to people?
Sounds like an interesting endeavour in any case,
Richard S.
richard@dontspamme.mailstart.com
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Geartrain Simulator
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| (...) Although I can't really help, I'm sure this would be of great use for creating realistic animations. Eric Regner: would you be able to use such information to animate, for example, a transmission? --Bram Bram Lambrecht / o o \ BramL@juno.com (...) (25 years ago, 2-Sep-99, to lugnet.cad)
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