First, Thanks for your interest in this design!
As of how to make such an animation - I also did that for the first time in my life.
I had installed and played around with my Slakware Linux 7.0 in the last days
and inspired by Bessler stuff and some upper insight just wanted to see, if
animated gif making is possible with StartOffice 5.1. And it was, and its even
quite easy. First you can draw with StarDraw (vector graphics program a la
Corel Draw) one initial picture, then you take from some menu "Duplicate Slide"
and create a copy of it as another sheet. There you can "select all" and rotate
it a bit and do other needed adjustments and etc for all needed "slides".
After one slide is ready, you also "select all" and "group" all the elements
on it to make one movable solid picture.
Then after all slides are ready in StarDraw, you move all drawings, which were
on different "slides" to one slide (or sheet) and remove other ampty slides and
save it in StarImpress format with "Save As".
Then with StarImpress (a presentation making soft a la PowerPoint) you open
this saved file and there you should see all the previously created pictures
for each animation frame put on one sheet. Now click on "Animation" in
"Presentation" menu and a window appears (initially its quite empty and even
most of buttons are disabled). First from "Animation Group" select "Bitmap
Object", then click on the main presentation sheet on that object which you
want to be the first frame in the moving gif. As you click, on the animation
window's "Bitmaps" group two buttons become clickable (you can see the buttons
functions at ToolTips - i.e. put the cursor on it and soon the text appears).
Click on "Apply object" button and that object appears in the animation
window's view field also. In such manner you add all needed objects for
animated picture frames and at the end press create. Now on the main
presentation sheet appears your moving picture (btw, it is not moving when it is
selected - so click on some other object to make it animate).
OK, now you have your moving picture, select it and copy it to clipboard. Save
the presentation for future use and close StarImpress. Now open StarImage (a
bitmap manipulation program a la PaintBrush) and press OK for default new
picture settings which it offers and "Paste" your clipboard animation to it.
Now there appears as many picture-sheets as there were frames in your
animation. If you want to change the color-depth (for reducing the resulting
file's size) you have to change it for all sheets separately using "Colors /
Modify Depth" menu.
And then the last step is to save it as GIF file.
Voila, your moving gif is ready.
Good thing is, that you can put the frames to animation in any needed order
i.e. you can make it work backwards also...
That was a really lengthy explanation, hopefully you're still awake ;-)
Back to such kind of wheel design - I really want to build them, but just don't
have suitable Meccano construction set with what to experiment (of course an
empty barrel, some petanque balls, center shaft and some solid steel bars
(as swivel-arms for balls) will do nicely...).
Maybe we shouldn't look at this design only from static gravity-based wiev, but
from dynamic point. If the falling ball's arm hits the center shaft, then the
ball at this position has both potential energy (m*g*h) plus a lot of kinetic
energy from free fall until the center shaft stopped it (m*v^2/2 or m*w^2/r).
Couldn't the kinetic energy due to it's square-relationship add up to this
system such an amount of torque which is needed for lifting another ball to
falling height? At he down side of the wheel there is no such sudden jerk to
oppose this upper torque-generating free fall.
By the way, I really like the KISS principle.
People tend to over-mystify things. Take as an example the crankshaft problem
in Bessler's wheel - why it was drawn as C? I think, that it was just the
question of aesthetics or also it could indicate the direction in which this
crankshaft has to rotate. I remember from my grandmother's estate an old
water-well, whose crankshaft's bar leading to handle was also curved instead of
being straight.
Also, maybe you don't remember such a demonstration from physics class, but sit
on a rotatable chair with body-building weights on your hands, spread your
hands and get the chair rotating. Now, as the chair rotates, move the hantels
(weights) close to your body. Miraculously the chair will start to rotate at a
lot faster. Chair's acceleration depends on how fast you move your hands. As you
spread your hands again, it will slow down again.
Now, what we need here is to get unidirectional acceleration. How at one place
move the weights close to center in very short time and at other place spread
them again at a lot lower rate? Simple - we can use harmonics theory!
Basically we need here a saw-tooth signal- slow ascension followed by steep
descension. Saw-tooth signal can be also expressed to be as composed of a lots
of sinusoidal harmonics.
Fsaw(x)=sin(x)+sin(2*x)/2+sin(3*x)/3+sin(4*x)/4+sin(5*x)/5+... the more
harmonics the better waveform (steeper descension at the end).
So maybe we can take for example a set of 7 or 9 balls with corresponding
weights (first ball's weight=1, second 1/3 etc) and attach them to arms with
same length which are attached to same one vertical axle. Lets put the whole
system to motion and begin to modulate sinusoidally the balls's positions on
their arms with corresponding frequency. In this case there should appear some
sudden accelerations in one direction and a lot milder decelerations. As you
can see, we dont have to create itself the sudden motions, but the whole
system, which consists of many harmonics, can create sudden motion in one
direction only. And the best part is - we can make those each separate balls to
move sinusoidally in THEIR OWN RESONANCE STATE, thus needing very little
outside energy.
It is very probable, that Bessler used some harmonics principle in his design,
because he uses also a pendulum in his system. Pendulum has a resonance state -
it has fixed swing frequency and it is essential for keeping his system
working and the wheel's inner weight-system in resonance falling-state.
As you can see from one of Bessler's pictures in wheels side view, there is a
stack of pillars with different heights - a harmonic system's weights???
So maybe here were some thoughts to think about..
With best regards,
-----------------------------------------
Rain Jarvelaid, Artec Design Group, Estonia, Europe
E-mail rain@artecdesign.ee
Tel: +372 6 710 974, GSM: +372 50 83554
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