Gearing Calculator

[Gui Cavalcanti]

Hey all. I just finished a nifty little program I call GearUp. You input wheel diameter, motor free speed, and your ideal maximum speed. You then pull up McMaster or whatever your source is for ordering gears and input all the teeth sizes (sprockets, gears, etc.) available to you. It will spit out what teeth ratios would suit your needs and what the new theoretical maximum speed would be.

Right now the 1.2 version only does up to 2 gear stages (1:2, 5:2), etc. Later versions will be able to do more gear stages, drive train and otherwise torque calculations, and gear ratios unrelated to drive trains.

What I need to know is this: is anyone interested in this program and think I should keep working at it, or is there another, better program out there, or is it a waste of time because you'd rather do it by hand, or what? Please post back with comments, I'd really appreciate it!

Oh, and I'll be releasing it via the White Papers soon, as soon as I tweak it. I'll also release the source code (C++) with it, so people can modify whatever they want.

[Aaron Lussier]

Dude that would be great it would save a lot of time figuring out gear ratios. Than having some kid who pulls numbers out of his @$$ doing the ratios. I say keep working on it.

[ChrisH]

I'm interested. Does it handle epicyclic gear trains too?

[Gui Cavalcanti]

If you mean planetary/orbital gears, right now heck no. However, version 1.2.1 is complete and I will post it as soon as possible to the white pages. It will give you a good taste of what is to come out of this program.

[evulish]

Port it to linux!

[Wetzel]

Originally posted by evulish
Port it to linux!

He said he would post the C++...
Give you something to do.


Anywho, I think this would be really interesting.
A function that I think would make it really great is if it showed the math as well as the result. Allow the process to be learned rather then just what data to enter to get the right number.


Wetzel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Damned open source zelots...

[ChrisH]

Originally posted by Gui Cavalcanti
If you mean planetary/orbital gears, right now heck no. However, version 1.2.1 is complete and I will post it as soon as possible to the white pages. It will give you a good taste of what is to come out of this program.

Maybe in version 2.0? The hard part is figuring out a way to describe the gear train in a way that people can understand. There are formulas for the most common combinations and they aren't that hard to calculate.