Recent content by timthereaper

I have some threaded rods on my 3D printer that I want to straighten. After searching Youtube for a quick easy method that doesn't involve a million "guess and check" steps, I found this: This guy seems to have concocted some method using Fourier series to straighten his rods. Not sure...

The best way to learn how these levers work is by drawing the free-body diagrams yourself and labeling the forces. Presumably you want to analyze these statically, so when determining the forces it's helpful to keep in mind that the sum of the forces in any component direction must be zero...

My FEA is a bit rusty so maybe others will have to chime into confirm or deny what I'm saying, but I'm replying for the sake of starting the discussion. In classical finite element theory (really the Galerkin method), we discretize the geometry by placing nodes and connecting them with...

If you're interested going the B-spline interpolation route, "The NURBS Book" by Piegl and Tiller has a few algorithms that I've personally used. They work well.

Agreed. Scratch is much more accessible. Maybe I'm expecting too much straight out of the gate with the young'uns. I just remember starting with C++ at 10 years old and wanting to do something "real" and not liking things like this that were very limited in their capabilities.

I have a 6- almost 7-year-old and I can't get him to sit still enough to teach him programming. However, if he was sufficiently curious and patient (a lot to ask from my 7 year old), I might start with Javascript. I know I'm definitely in the minority, but it's easy to start with and if you have...

As dumb an answer as this is, I think it's just a consequence of Lenz' law: From Wikipedia: If the current is decreasing, the induced voltage will be negative at the terminal through which the current enters and positive at the terminal through which it leaves, tending to maintain the current...

I took a graduate level course in control systems for flight dynamics and this was the textbook that they used: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691149216/?tag=pfamazon01-20 It was really interesting because the techniques that were used here were developed out of research done for the US Air...

I agree with Mech_Engineer's analysis regarding the pole's rigidity. As an aside, I like DaveC's suggestion about corrugating the pole. The problem would be manufacturing, specifically making sure that the radii are large enough that the CF can fill in the grooves and not be smaller than the...

It depends on the work I'm doing. I use Git+Bitbucket for programming work, Google Drive for a lot of things, and the rest I have a file server and a NAS at home.

Ever done a Simulink model of the ball and beam control system? If not, start there. In case you haven't done any work yet on this, you'll have to draw some sort of diagram and get your equations of motion and kinematics right. I would suggest using Lagrange for that. Give us some more details...

If this is just a Matlab question, then use u = K \ F. If it's a finite element question, you need to consult a few textbooks first.

So I tried reading a bit more on this, and I came to the conclusion that a hologram is a really complicated diffraction grating that causes a light source to interfere with itself to create a 3D virtual image that we see. Am I close?

I'm not seeing the connection from the speed of the flywheel to powering a device. Variably changing the moment of inertia will change the speed, but the energy stored will be the same. You'll have to do work on the flywheel to move the weights in toward the axis and the flywheel energy could be...

I don't see how you can to do it with the cosine and sine functions there. You'll have to linearize about some theta. Plus, I'm backing @rrdrr8556 in that I also don't understand how you're coming up with those as the differential equations, assuming dX and dY is just bad shorthand for the...