Reminds me of how I got into computing in the first place.
During the 1970s, my dad designed an engine, similar in principle to the Wiseman Engine: https://wisemanengine.com
To better explore and elucidate his ideas, he bought a TRS-80 Model 16 computer (Model II compatible) with high resolution graphics option and wrote a BASIC program that could compare the mechanical advantage graphs of several different engine mechanisms including his own. He had begun to add a visualization of the mechanism itself to the program. He had only completed the slider crank (what is used in most auto engines), but there it was, animated at half a frame a second: a wireframe drawing of a piston that moved up and down, pushing on a crank that turned the crankshaft. And my brain was like what manner of high wizardry is this!!
This site is exemplary of what I had glimpsed that day, going on 40 years ago: the power computers have to explain our world and bring alive the principles that drive it.
During the 1970s, my dad designed an engine, similar in principle to the Wiseman Engine: https://wisemanengine.com
To better explore and elucidate his ideas, he bought a TRS-80 Model 16 computer (Model II compatible) with high resolution graphics option and wrote a BASIC program that could compare the mechanical advantage graphs of several different engine mechanisms including his own. He had begun to add a visualization of the mechanism itself to the program. He had only completed the slider crank (what is used in most auto engines), but there it was, animated at half a frame a second: a wireframe drawing of a piston that moved up and down, pushing on a crank that turned the crankshaft. And my brain was like what manner of high wizardry is this!!
This site is exemplary of what I had glimpsed that day, going on 40 years ago: the power computers have to explain our world and bring alive the principles that drive it.