Formula RaceLAB

Jerry Magana and Ian Campbell are proposing a series of videos that follow Formula SAE teams across the country through the design, manufacture, and testing of their entries to the 2011 Formula SAE competition. They have used footage from the 2010 Formula SAE California to give a feeling for what these videos could be like.

The video Formula: RaceLAB can be found at http://www.flyeye.com. Select the menu item “Projects” and scan down “Interactive” to the second to last video. You can also see a teaser video on their blog at http://blog.flyeye.com.

Mathematica File for Linkage Synthesis

Select this link to download our Mathematica notebook for four-bar linkage synthesis. It will download as a textfile, so delete the .txt extension, then Mathematica should be able to read it. If you have an problems, please contact me.

This notebook is an example of the type of programs that I use to teach mechanism theory. In my courses students generate their own notebooks like this for the analysis and synthesis of various linkages. The program is not optimized in any way.

This particular notebook does provide a new capability. It uses a randomized search in tolerance zones near the required task positions to find linkages that do not have well-known defects. Cut and paste the text file output into our Mechanism Generator software to automatically generate a SolidWorks model of the linkage and task.

This SolidWorks animation of the drive linkage for a hardtop convertible was prepared by Oscar Alonso from U.S. Patent No. 7014247 (Dilluvio) and previous references.