Gearotic Motion V 4 7 127
Jannet Nevels
Gearotic Motion is a powerful software tool for designing and simulating various types of gears and mechanical systems. Developed by ArtSoft Canada Inc., this program is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to both beginners and advanced users.
With Gearotic Motion, users can create a wide variety of gears and other mechanical components using an intuitive interface and an array of powerful features. The program includes a library of pre-designed gear templates that users can select from, as well as the ability to generate custom gears using a range of parameters such as pitch, diameter, and tooth profile.
In addition to designing gears, Gearotic Motion also allows users to simulate the motion of complex mechanical systems, with support for mesh analysis, motion testing, and collision detection. The program also includes tools for creating CNC code, allowing users to take their designs from concept to reality.
Gearotic Motion is a versatile and powerful tool for anyone interested in mechanical design and engineering. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, this software offers the tools you need to create precise and functional mechanical components with ease.
This project is simply amazing! This student created from scratch an entire planetarium with over 70 gears. He used a do-it-yourself CNC, fusion 360 and the program gearotic motion to come up with the gears combination.
Since we all have access to arduinos and a stepper motor from our kits I thought it would be a good idea to base the motor control off of that. for the final motor control we will need to use larger independently powered motors. The advantage of using stepper motors is high positional accuracy built in without any other systems. The major disadvantage is high cost and power consumption.
One option is to close the loop and use a dc motor with a pid control to position it. I found some helpful code that was helpful to understanding the control scheme. the primary advantages for this would be lower cost, faster speed, and potentially increased accuracy. The primary disadvantages would be the increased complexity of a hall effect sensor and magnets along the ring.
The gantry design was done in fusion 360. The frame will be cut out of two sheets of 3/4 nominal plywood. The gear teeth for the internal gears will need to be cut with a 1/4 inch bit. for generating the gears I used this script to generate the gears, with some modification after the fact. This had some issues and though I was able to adapt it to the drawing it was less than idea.
Studying gears is faschinating. The first important concept about gears is the gear ratio. Definition: a gear ratiois a direct measure of the ratio of the rotational speeds of two or more interlocking gears. As a general rule, when dealing with two gears, if the drive gear (the one directly receiving rotational force from the engine, motor, etc.) is bigger than the driven gear, the latter will turn more quickly, and vice versa. We can express this basic concept with the formula Gear ratio = T2/T1, where T1 is the number of teeth on the first gear and T2 is the number of teeth on the second. Therefore, the gear ration shows how many times a gear has to turn for the other one to make an entire turn. A ratio of 1:3 means that a gear of 1 teeth will turn 3 times for each turn of the gear of 3 teeth. So, if we want to create gears for a clock, for example, we need to have a ratio of 1:12 because you need the gears with the minutes to turn 12 times for the gears with the hours to go back to the original position. Now, gears with one tooth are of course not possible and this tutorial suggests to have gears with at least with 7 teeth. So, in the case of the watch, we would have 7:84.
I also had an interesting time looking up how to make gears. There are alot of Youtube videos about how to model gears on Fusion but they are mostly out of date. Out of curiosity and frustration, I checked out Tinkercad to see if they had any good plugins and they had at least four just dedicated to making gears!
We could use a complex system of gears like the one used in the mechanical planetarium with over 70 gears. In that case, we could replicate the system of gears used in the planetarium project which is the following:
This of course is not the only combination available. However, I could not find any program like gearotic motion that would work on mac. If I understood well, with that program you can set the ratio you need and the program suggests a gears system that would work. I also found this alternative algorithm developed in R for a similar project:
Alternatively, we could use a simpler system with motors for each planet. That would save us quite a lot of headaches to figure our the gears system. In this case, we would need 2 gears for each planet. One connected to the motor and one connected to the ring of each planet. Something like this system used for a clock:
In a typical year, I realize our group would come together and make this machine that we have created on our screens! But for now, we are still not permitted to be more than 6 ' close to one another and even if we were, our entire group is in a different part of the world. So due to this fact of life right now, it was impossible to work as a team and unrealistic to expect each of us to complete this on our own. I did ask my instructors about this and they checked with coordination thar tis is acceptable given the circumstances.
I have made quite a few wooden and acrylic gears even a herribone gear using a 3axis 100 watt laser that I added 2 axis for 5 axis. I used gearotic software to create the gears and then imported them as a dxf file into my cad program where I would povide and offset of .005" for the beam. Worked really well.
A pendulum clock is conceptually very simple. A spring or falling weight provides energy to a swinging pendulum that swings at a constant rate. A series of gears convert the pendulum motion into a display for the hours and minutes. The challenge is to make everything work elegantly and accurately. Designing this clock has been a spare time hobby of mine for the past 6-8 months. I started with a basic sketch of the clock, then fit the gears so they would be relatively symmetrical.
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