Animated planetary gears

I took the existing planetary gears model in the Examples folder and extended it to support animation and changing of the gear ratio. To run the animation, load it into OpenSCAD and select Animate in the View Menu. Set values for FPS and Steps. 45 and 90 seems to work nicely. The animation will start and run indefinitely until you turn it off in the menu.

Planetary gears can be used in several ways. I have animated only the form where the outer ring is fixed.

You can change the numbers of teeth on the sun and planet gears, either as parameters in GraphSCAD or by editing the parameters in OpenSCAD, where they conveniently appear very near the top of the file.

Note that both figures must be either odd or even for the gears at 90 degrees to mesh correctly. Also, the sun must not be too small or the planets will collide with one another. Both of these conditions are tested for and warning messages displayed in the model window.

I am currently using GraphSCAD 1.0.0 on Ubuntu 16.

Chris Lusby Taylor
clusbytaylor@gmail.com
30 Jan 2017

The graph you made is cool ;-). Was a little lazy to compute rotation od each gears to animate them ;-)

this give me idea to implement an option to output animated gif with graphscad

and you added parameters.... really good !

Admin wrote:

Unfortunately, this animated gif has too few samples, so the central sun gear appears to be going backwards. This is like wagon wheels in old western films.