PolyGear is a powerful OpenSCAD library to create spur and bevel gears as a single polyhedron. The library allows full control of the involute tooth profile, including pressure angle, backlash, variable helix angle, addendum, dedendum and profile shifting.
Being able to vary the helix angle allows for instantaneous generation and switch between herringbone, zerol, spiral and customized profiles; all constructed as a single and smooth polyhedron even for small facet number.
The gear is constructed in an extremely efficient way, by triangulating a minimalist vertex cloud with a single polyhedron.
I wrote this library because I was unsatisfied with the existing ones:
- https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575
- https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:636119
- https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1604369
being, to my taste, either too hampered, fragile or computational expensive. My aim has been overcoming these limitations. Do not expect lightening holes or other gimmicks, but comprehensive and efficient control over your gear teeth.
I would expect that the comments in the code and the demo example should suffice as user documentation, but if I collect some good questions I may compile a FAQ.
- PolyGear.scad - main file, the one that you should read and use in your project
- PolyGearBase.scad - computation of the gear profile and some meshing functions
- PolyGearUtils.scad - collection of more and less trivial complementary functions
- linspace.scad - lightweight library for producing range of points
- shortcuts.scad - a slightly enhanced version of the excellent shortcuts library by Parkinbot
In the docs folder you will find a copy of the nice open access paper which I use for the generation of the involute profiles. It explains the computations implemented in PolyGearBase.scad
The example folder collects some complex assemblies constructed with just a few line of codes by empowering PolyGear.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
