Ladies and Gentlemen, you will like this. Here is a harmonograph in MS Excel 2003 which models a real one build by Karl Sims. Watch the video first to know what to expect. I could have built it from the bare drawing equations but that would have been too easy and no fun at all so I tried to model the real mechanism with 3 pendulums and the linkage rods. It took me a weekend to make it. You can start or pause the drawing process with the green “Run-Pause” button. There is a “Reset” button too, use it whenever you want to erase the previous drawing. Excel 2007 will work but it will be excessively slow with this file. There are six different configurations I saved, just dial a number from 1 to 6 and hit “Load”. If you create your own configuration, dial a number larger than 6 and click “Save”. This way you can use it later. There is room for 100 configurations. The 6 pictures below correspond to the saved configurations. I will add more explanations soon, plus I want to build it in 3D. Don’t forget, a 90 degrees phase diference between orthogonal sinusoids means a circle, zero or 180 degrees means a segment and everything in between are ellipses. Just a word of caution, it’s addictive! Do you have something to say? I’d love to hear from you so leave me a comment below. Enjoy, George
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[...] using Microsoft Excel. Of particular interest are the models of a 3-body planetary system, a three-pendulum harmonograph, and a Lissajous emulator. Spreadsheet flexibility has opened me up to a whole new realm of [...]