This site has photographs of a large number of devices used to teach physics. It is fascinating.
Select the link: http://physics.kenyon.edu/EarlyApparatus/index.html

Recently, I became aware of the overall poor quality of the articles on machines in Wikipedia, and I have spent quite a bit of time revising these articles over the past month. I hope my contributions are an improvement. Please take a look:

• Machine (mechanical)
• Mechanical system
• Linkage (mechanical)
• Screw axis
• Burmester’s theory
• Four-bar linkage
• Mechanism (engineering)
• Instantaneous center of rotation
• Screw theory
• Dual quaternion
• Mechanical advantage
• Overconstrained mechanism
• Kinematic pair
• Virtual work

As you may know anyone may edit Wikipedia, and it is intended to allow user communities to maintain the quality of particular sets articles. It is important that we take this opportunity because Wikipedia is an important resource to our students.

The training videos that Smitty developed for our design classes at UCI can be access at the YouTube site: Engineering Training Site.

The videos include basic welding 1 and 2, hand tools, soldering, metal forming 1 and 2, cutting, filing grinding and fitting metal for welding, measurements and layouts, and fasteners.

Here is something new. Our Mathematica notebook can find defect-free spherical four-bar linkages that guide a body through five orientations in a tolerance zone near a specified set of task orientations.

Geometric Design of Linkages, second edition

I am pleased to say that the second edition of my book, Geometric Design of Linkages, is now available, and I have to express my sincere gratitude to my co-author GimSong Soh, who helped make it happen.

You can find more information at the Springer Verlag web-page, GDL on Springer.com.

It is also already on Google Books, you can see it at the link GDL on books.google.com.

This is a draft of my editorial on 21st Century Kinematics for the Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. It is a follow-up to my previous editorial on Kinematics, Polynomials and Computers. I would welcome your feedback.

Select this link to the .pdf of Kinematics, Polynomials, and Computers–A Brief History, which is a summary of the history of the kinematics of mechanisms and robotics with a focus on the challenge of solving the polynomial equations that arise in their study.  It is a draft of my February 2011 editorial for the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics.

***Update*** This version has a correction to references [29] and [30].

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 video shows the operation of a cam-driven toy artist.

I found it on Dug North’s Automata/Automaton blog, http://dugnorth.com/blog/

My class notes on cam-follower systems can be downloaded at the link: http://synthetica.eng.uci.edu/~mccarthy/mechanicaldesign101/McCarthyNotes-Cams2.pdf

Lecture notes on cam-follower systems

The basic properties of robots can developed by studying planar serial chains. Select this link for my notes on elementary robotics:
http://synthetica.eng.uci.edu/~mccarthy/mechanicaldesign101/McCarthyNotes-5.pdf

Elementary Robotics