Rendered Examples Software Description Iconography

Main Loop

As mentioned above, viewport VP1 is used to display the solid model representation of the mechanism selected in VP2. If we look at Fig. 3a, we notice that there are up to sixteen different types of mechanisms with independent synthesis procedures, which are identified with the labels shown at the right-hand side of Fig. 3a. The flowchart sample of these procedures is shown in Fig. 3b. In the synthesis of one of the sixteen mechanisms the user will be working most of the time in its corresponding procedure, which is the reason why we call it the main loop.

All sixteen procedures have similar structures; what changes in each case is only the synthesis algorithm, construct_surfaces, the procedures to generate the solid models of cam and follower, draw_solids, and the procedures to draw the icons of VP3 and VP4, namely, draw_icons. At the main-loop level, USyCaMs performs the algorithm of the flowchart of Fig. 3b.

 

(a) 3_ind_pp	(b) 3_ind_pr
(c) 3_ind_rp	(d) 3_ind_rr

Figure 4:   Three-link indexing cam mechanisms.