This looks pretty fantastic on mobile. Nice and responsive. Great animations. Good job!
Gears
141–150 of 230 posts
Re: Gears
#142If someone ever makes the creation process for this type of visualization accessible to the average university professor, it could blow the lid of the digital textbook market. Most digital textbooks I've seen are basically just putting the text and images on a web page, and maybe integrating multiple choice quizzes. That's seriously under-utilizing the medium. They need to be interactive , and encourage the student t…
This sort of interactivity would be perfect for Wikipedia.
Re: Gears
#143Can you 3d print gears?
Re: Gears
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
PETG. Specifically it would either be Hatchbox PETG or PushPlastic PETG.
Have you considered fibre reinforced plastic? I'm not an expert but I'm curious if that's a good option.
I’ve seen fiberglass reinforced nylon gears used with success in commercial injection molded gearboxes. It can definitely help by increasing gear stiffness.
However 3D printing with fiberglass causes rapid nozzle wear, and recently people are saying that fiberglass reinforced 3D printing filaments represent a human hazard.
Since I’ve managed to get my gears to work without reinforcement, I’ve not tried it.
One thing I do with printed gears is make the gear teeth much larger than would be strictly needed in an injection molded solution. This lets me deal with reduced material performance compared to injection molding.
Re: Gears
#145I really like this presentation! It’s wonderful. I don’t mean to hijack but I thought this would be an appropriate place to share a photo album of the 3D printed planetary gears in my open source robot: https://imgur.com/gallery/GqXD2Zj I’ve been 3D printing gears for some years now and I want to spread the word that 3D printed gears actually work really well! The gears in the image album above have been operating on…
That project looks great! I'm very tempted to start building this because of how good it looks, but I know it would take lots of time and effort, even with the designs already available.
As an aside, would something like https://www.makerfol.io/ be useful for your build log? I see many people using imgur for this but it's always struck me as suboptimal.
Re: Gears
#146Very nice! These animations are running in a . Any idea what the author used? Is everything produced with math (eg: a gear solver, etc)?
I was wondering the same! The author appears to be using his own functions written in vanilla JS. The Gears page loads a custom Canvas library base.js [1] plus an page-specific gears.js [2]. iOS graphics appears to be an area of expertise [3] for the author. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/base.js [2]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/gears.js [3]: https://github.com/Ciechan?tab=repositories (P.S. is an interesting choice, I h…
Thanks for the JS files.
Would be nice to know about his process.
Here it appears he is importing the graphics from somewhere else converted to imperative drawing code:
Re: Gears
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is indeed great, and probably one reason you don't see it more is that it's a ton of work! That's 5K lines of hand-written code! (view source and it's at the end of the page) $ wc -l gears.js base.js 4135 gears.js 904 base.js 5039 total I've wanted to make visualizations like this for my blog. Writing a blog post takes me around 10 hours, which is a fair amount of effort. I believe that the visualizations will tak…
Having been down this road, yes, it does take time, but you can save some time by using SVG and some DOM library. Although canvas is faster, most diagrams don't really need it, so I use SVG unless I really need to switch to canvas. SVG also adjusts for screen dpi automatically. The things I like: 1. Reactivity (ObservableHQ, Vue.js, hyperactiv.js, etc.). There's usually some underlying data and then a corresponding v…
Thanks for these tips -- I've seen your visualizations and it's nice to hear from people who have done it!
It's cool that you were able to reproduce the diagram quickly and in a small amount of code. It looks a bit foreign to me, probably because I don't know much about SVG (or canvas for that matter). And as I understand it Observable is almost another language on top. (I do know HTML, CSS, and JS pretty well, but there's still a gap.)
Do you ever mock visualizations up in a WYSIWIG tool, or do you always use web technologies in a text editor?
Doing it programmatically has advantages when you need to make 30 similar diagrams, as in this post about gears.
But I also feel WYSIWIG tools could help in prototyping to avoid throwing away a lot of code that wasn't properly conceived of. That is, implementing the visualization is only part of the huge amount of work; the other part is designing it of course. And in many cases the design effort is probably larger.
For example, I have wanted to write an article about regexes, visualizing NFAs and DFAs. I find that some programmers have trouble with the idea of nondeterminism, which is more of a mathematical thing. A subtitle would be something like "A trie is a special case of a DFA".
This post has some nice diagrams, and you can easily imagine them being interactive and more approachable:
https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
(in fact a few months ago else I posited that a textual summary of these great but dense posts would be useful too)
I can sort of imagine what I want to visualize, but I also think there will also be many false starts. Though maybe a pencil and paper is sufficient. I'm not sure I will get to it, but this polished and smooth gears post got me thinking again! Using something reactive like vue rather than doing it "vanilla JS" is also probably something I should look into as well.
Re: Gears
#148This is an absolutely phenomenal 'explorable explanation'. It methodically layers concepts to foster understanding, deploys interactivity to build intuition, and on top of all that provides crisp, clear narrative on top of all of the amazing visualizations.
Is there a widely known name for these types of 'explorable explanations'?
Explorable Explanations is the term AFAIK. Nicky Case has a whole page of resources on the topic: https://explorabl.es/
Re: Gears
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's also what I was taught as a best practice, but it's not always possible. Otherwise, best practice is to index the gears (ie mark a specific tooth on each). That way, when you disassemble the gearbox (it's bound to happen sometime for maintenance), you can make sure it's reassembled so that the same teeth will continue to mesh, preserving the wear pattern. Otherwise, wear is substantially increased.
That's also what I was taught as a best practice, but it's not always possible. Well of course it's possible -there are infinitely many sets of coprime numbers! Silly engineers
Good luck for when you need exactly 2:1 ratio, like eg in clocks.
Re: Gears
#150This was simply wonderful, and hidden at the bottom was a link to an insect named "Issus coleoptratus"[1] which evolved something like a biological gear for synchronizing its legs.
As an almost complete aside, in Terry Pratchett's "Last Continent" there is a God of Evolution that comments on how difficult it is design a biological wheel.
“It’s very hard to design an organic wheel, you know,” said the god reproachfully. “They’re little masterpieces.”
“You don’t think just, you know, moving the legs about would be simpler?”
“Oh, we’d never get anywhere if I just copied earlier ideas,” said the god. “Diversify and fill all niches, that’s the ticket.”
“But is lying on your side in a mud hole with your wheels spinning a very important niche?” said Ponder.