Manually specify tooth count?
Opened this issue · 2 comments
This is a great idea and a neat UI. Any chance you could add a way to specify the number of teeth on a gear?
The ability to precisely specify gears' number of teeth would make it easier to get the exact gear ratios you want and could be a nice addition. The interface would become more complicated, so there's a trade-off between power and simplicity here. I've been thinking about this, but don't have a good idea yet about how this could be implemented in such a way that the extra complexity is worth it for my use case, introducing students to qualitative relations between gear sizes, connection types, turning directions and turning speeds. I'm open to suggestions though.
One way that might help OCD people like bronson and myself as well as helping pedagogically would be to have a simple overlay and the ability to grab the gear near the end of the radial line and resize it. Some indicator of the gear's size (mm, inches, pixels, etc.) and gears would also demonstrate that the size would have to "fit" all of the teeth as well as take it from "make this one bigger and the one way over there spins even faster" to showing that making it n times larger makes another wheel or gear move faster or slower by a related amount.
Then you could ask the kids to predict what size was needed to get what speed from the end of the gear train.
OK, I've said enough to try forking now. :-) Thanks for the fun simulator!