My impression is that gearify produces 'roller' profiles which (in the idealized case) have a continuous point of contact between the two rollers, rather than one that "jumps around" like the red dots in this youtube video:Gearify wrote: ...
HOWEVER! It is my hope that I can eventually find or produce a suitable generalization of the involute tooth concept for arbitrary non-circular gears. So far I have the following possible strategies:
1. Find some credible literature with a clear and reasonable approach to generalize involute teeth to non-ciruclar gears (no luck so far)
2. Devise my own generalization that at LEAST removes vibration (I have some ideas)
3. approximate the non-circular shape as a series of circular segments and use appropriate involute teeth per segment (meh.. I don't even yet know if this makes sense)
4. Allow the user to upload a "virtual hob" (which Artf mentioned) so that the portion cut away from the subtracion process can be larger than the tooth itself. This is a big feature on my TODO list. May not solve the issue but may get me closer.
So that's where I'm at with involute teeth. Its definitely my most requested, and desired feature, but as ArtF mentioned, it is very very hard to involute tooth a non-circular gear.
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Feel free to ask me any questions or offer ideas for how you would like to see Gearify improved, or possible solutions for how to make the gears more suitable for application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14yMFdgWM-A
Is that impression correct?
IMO Generalizing involutes to no non-circular profiles really isn't that hard. It's basically just like generating involute tooth flanks point-by-point.
I worked through the basics earlier this year: http://gearotic.com/ESW/FavIcons/index.php?topic=1313.0
For more advanced topics like how to use profile shifting I can't help you much.
I played with interpolating the roll line as a series of circular arcs and putting involute teeth on those, but that can have mechanically undesirable properties. For example, it won't work properly for non-circular gears with a fixed pivot.