Kinematic simulation

Hi,
I want to simulate mechanisms from 3D printable parts, imported in STL.
I started with a crank + rod system (3 revolutes + 1 slider).
In Onshape I can quite easily simulate motion transmission:
Bielle manivelle 301016
I started assembling parts in CoSpaces Edu, but I do not know how to use the physics engine to get the same motion in Blockly.

Thank you for your help.
Daniel Pers (STEM teacher, LP2I, France)

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Incredible stuff Daniel. I love this, it creates so many potential uses and testing.

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Hi Brian,
Today CoSpaces EDU focuses on VR, but in the STEM french curriculum, students need to model, simulate, vary design parameters for that the technical solution corresponds to the need (with a certain number of constraints defined in the specifications) but they also need to experiment and compare the results obtained by simulation and those obtained experimentally.
A 3D printer is a great tool for experimenting with technical motion transmission solutions.
To manage the behavior of the mechanism, students can use a programmable electronic board, sensors, … Unfortunately CoSpaces does not allow to program an electronic board. It’s a big problème for me. I talk about this in this new topic: To program an electronic board with CoSpaces EDU

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Hi Daniel,

thanks for your feedback! Please have a look at this demo: https://cospac.es/edu/38Tw

It makes use of our internal physics APIs which we are working on and these APIs aren’t accessible via Blockly yet. But we’re working on it so simulations like this will be doable for you in the foreseeable future.

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Hi Benny,
This is for me the best news in CoSpaces since the introduction of Blockly in January 2017! :star_struck:
If students can easily assemble 3D printable parts to create mechanisms and simulate cinematic behavior, CoSpaces would become a must-have educational tool for teaching STEM to young students.
What is still missing for effective educational use is the real-time display of graphs such as positions, angles or velocities as functions of time, to observe the influence of certain parameters such as dimensions of parts.
Congratulations to all the team for their work and taking into account our educational needs.
I can not wait to test all that with my students.

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Displaying graphs sounds like a good idea! Please have a look again: https://cospac.es/edu/38Tw

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What responsiveness!
Unfortunately the last simulation does not work for me. It seems to me that the gray piece is not fixed.

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Doesn’t it look like this on your side?

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It was OK without the graph. But the simulation doesn’t work with the graph.
I will make a capture when I have a little time.

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I was able to see it clearly with the graph but the other scenes didn’t work

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I tested tonight on my PC and it works well.
But on my laptop it does not work:

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:open_mouth: Never seen this before.

Can you please share the specs of your laptop. Also, which OS and browser do you use?

Thank you!

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Toshiba Satellite S50-B-15E :
. Intel Core i5-5200U 2.2GHz + 8Go
. AMD Radeon R7 M260
. Win10 64bits
. Google Chrome 64 bits V61 : simulation works in a buggy way (jitter), 1 turn in about 9s
. Mozilla Firefox 32 bits V53 : simulation works normaly but slowly, 1 turn in about 15s

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This is exactly my feeling too.

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