GearHeads Corner

I purchased gearotic to help me design gears for clocks and kinetic sculptures.

I have a couple questions about some things I would like to do that I haven't figured out already.

1. Can you import shapes to attach to the gears? I would like to see how things look in motion. I am currently using a program called working model 2D for this, but it gets real messy trying to edit multiple layers of objects
2. can you have shafts that aren't fixed? i would like to makes some planetary gear trains, but I can't figure out how to get past the first set. I would also like to have gears out on moving arms and whatnot.
3. Does anyone here use Autodesk Inventor? I would like to extrude some of the gears I'm designing in Gearotic, but haven't figured out how to do it. I noticed a post elsewhere in this forum about it, but it's a couple years old and the Inventor issue never seemed to be solved.
4. Is there a way to set a pendulum as the driver? The only solution I've found so far it to use one of the escapements and gear off the pallet shaft to get close to the desired rotations/speed I'm looking for

Thanks for any info you can provide in advance.

I look forward to mastering this piece of software and making some interesting stuff to share with the forum

Rhett

Hi Rhett:

>>>1. Can you import shapes to attach to the gears? I would like to see how things look in motion. I am currently using a program called working model 2D for this, but it gets real messy trying to edit multiple layers of objects

  You cannot as yet import shapes. Its planned to have that capability , at least at having STL shaped loadable to attack to any
rotating gear or item. But as yet, only the items made can be animated.

>>2. can you have shafts that aren't fixed? i would like to makes some planetary gear trains, but I can't figure out how to get past the first set. I would also like to have gears out on moving arms and whatnot.

  This also cannot yet be done. All shafts are assumed to be fixed, so things like having an elliptical run on a round gear are not yet possible.

>>3. Does anyone here use Autodesk Inventor? I would like to extrude some of the gears I'm designing in Gearotic, but haven't figured out how to do it. I noticed a post elsewhere in this forum about it, but it's a couple years old and the Inventor issue never seemed to be solved.

  I dont use it personally, but generally if youd like to extrude the gears from Gearotic with other software, it has to be able to load the DXF's of those gears. The 3d dxf puts out mesh information while the 2d dxf puts out the shape which is usually a straight extrude.

>>4. Is there a way to set a pendulum as the driver? The only solution I've found so far it to use one of the escapemen ts and gear off the pallet shaft to get close to the desired rotations/speed I'm looking for

  The escapement is always the driver when one is used. You CAN right click on it in the tree, and select a time of rotation for that escapement, so no matter the pendulum lenght you use, it will simulate on the rotational speed you give it in the tree.

Thx
Art