51–60 of 67 posts
Pay attention. If you ever get sent back in time, this information will be important. You can make a fortune with this and the ability to create a solar oven to boil sea salt for salt (that's the seed money right there).
My guess is that basic linkages like this are not patentable, even if you invent a "new" one. That could be an argument in support of not allowing patents for at least the fundamentals of computer science and programming.
Do you have any evidence to support this or is it just your reckons?
Is there a name for the field of computer science that classifies these linkages by their topological proporties other than just general CAD stuff? It would be awesome to say I have linkage A and linkage C, what kind of linkage B can I put in the middle?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some time ago i talked with a machine designer - and he told me that the industry is moving away from complex mechanical contraptions , into microcontrolers coupled with smart motors(servo - either linear or rotary) which allow exact controlled positioning.
Except for the mechanical watch industry; which might make a serious comeback? I mean it's still here, but interest has faded. I have weird feeling people will become interested, beyond a steampunk level, in finely machined/designed mechanical watch movements? The Internet has made watchmaking/repair something a determined person can learn at home. I guarantee once you learn the basics, you will look at that old Seam…
(Art is also the earliest adopter of new tech.)
Amazing. Now I'm left to wonder what all these contraptions are good for. For example, why would one use something like this "Persian joint": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFoiSRWdW5E ?
Some time ago i talked with a machine designer - and he told me that the industry is moving away from complex mechanical contraptions , into microcontrolers coupled with smart motors(servo - either linear or rotary) which allow exact controlled positioning.
For those interested in these kind of mechanical things, Dover has republished some 19th and early 20th century public domain books that collected together mechanical movements. Some examples: "507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices" by Henry T. Brown, from 1868: http://www.amazon.com/507-Mechanical-Movements-Mechanisms-De... "1800 Mechanical Movements, Devices and Appliances" by Gardner D. Hiscox, first pu…
Google Books has scanned the 507 Mechanical Movements book, although their search engine is terrible at finding things like that on their own site; one copy is available from http://www.pdnotebook.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_16/custom.... The other, longer book is harder to find via HTTP, although Libgen has a scan of the 2007 reprint. Timothy Schmidt scanned the original 1899 edition in 2008 and uploaded it to The Pirate Bay, which seems to not have it now: http://builders.reprap.org/2008/12/1800-mechanical-movements....
US patents are also a wonderful source of public-domain diagrams of machinery, and they are generally better explained (especially before about the 1980s, at which point their writing quality took a nosedive and they descended into nearly-unreadable jargon) but I'm not aware of an easily downloadable repository of scanned patents.
This is amazing, like a code repo for mechanical programming. You have a number of common libraries here such as planetary clutches, along with a variety of solutions to common problems like how to convert between straight and circular motion. In fact just like in coding where you have common issues like how to do an associative array, you have common issues in mech like how do I keep something pointing the same dire…
Pay attention. If you ever get sent back in time, this information will be important. You can make a fortune with this and the ability to create a solar oven to boil sea salt for salt (that's the seed money right there).
I prefer to remember "75% saltpeter, 12.5% charcoal, 12.5% sulfur" for those pesky traveled-back-to-Medieval-Times situations.
Seeing this leaves me incredibly dissatisfied with the state of Wikipedia. This is what it should be about. Using rich media to explain and fascinate. Instead we get 10.000 words on the history of Anime.
Is there a name for the field of computer science that classifies these linkages by their topological proporties other than just general CAD stuff? It would be awesome to say I have linkage A and linkage C, what kind of linkage B can I put in the middle?
Yes, there is: "kinematic synthesis." It is not typically considered a "computer science" topic; it is instead taught in various forms in mechanical engineering curriculums.