Gears • Hacker News Board

Re: Gears

#61

Post by dmix » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:29 PM UTC

whiddershins wrote: post #59

I am super impressed by the smooth animation and the graphic design of the elements. I wish this were all open source so I could just copy it in to a project I’m in the middle of. Very inspiring.

There are 30(!) different animations on this one blog post alone.

The work he put into this is admirable. A great education tool.

Re: Gears

#62

Post by jakub_g » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

ftio wrote: post #34

This 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.

If you enjoyed the article, check out others by the same author which are done in a similar way. For example https://ciechanow.ski/color-spaces/ and https://ciechanow.ski/earth-and-sun/

Re: Gears

#63

Post by learn_more » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #46

While I appreciate the beauty this piece, I can't help but think of the irony of such a complicated piece to explain something which mechanics and engineers, who actually use gears, understand completely intuitively.

I had the same feeling, hoping to receive an epiphany, perhaps on the bevel of the gear teeth, but nope. Then I thought, ok, surely there's an insight to be gained regarding helical gears, but it was never discussed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear#Helical

Re: Gears

#64

Post by nimish » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

jentulman wrote: post #19

nimish wrote: post #15

> Almost by definition, the second hand of a clock rotates at 1 rpm Minute hand, surely ;)

The minute hand would be one revolution an hour.

Hoist by my own petard!

Re: Gears

#65

Post by NegativeLatency » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

If you're interested in the machining/making of gears there's a youtube channel where a person makes clocks and other timekeeping devices (some of ancient designs). It's fascinating to watch, and makes me want to get a metal lathe/mill someday.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA

Re: Gears

#66

Post by mottosso » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:43 PM UTC

dmortin wrote: post #17

There should be some tool to make such nice animations easily. Not just gears, but any other illustrations with moving parts with the ability to have a zoomed in detail beside the animation, etc.

You're in luck, such a tool exists! It's HTML and JavaScript. :)

Re: Gears

#67

Post by mholt » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:44 PM UTC

I didn't know anything about gears until someone filed an issue to tell me that a graphic on the Caddy homepage was wrong: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2949

Wish I saw this earlier!

Re: Gears

#68

Post by fit2rule » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

This is awesome. I wonder if the author could be convinced to participate in a similar discourse on the subject of gears, as they relate to audio synthesisers?

Pretty much all the modern synths these days have infinitely lubricated gears and pulleys in them, pushing those speaker cones/amp inputs ..

Re: Gears

#69

Post by jvanderbot » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

For me, nothing beats the mechanical calculator used to calculate torpedo firing solutions in WWII. It was a sophisticated differential equation solver that kept a real-time updated firing solution using ... gears.

There's a whole maintenance and operations manual beautifully scanned here[1]. I've wanted to build one forever, but lack the time and expertise.

1. https://maritime.org/tech/tdc.htm

Re: Gears

#70

Post by otto_ortega » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

Lovely work, thanks!