Rotation & angle of universal joint?

[Roland Melkert]

Roland, thanks a lot for this script! Although it has some bugs (and it's UI is... eh... minimalistic? ), it is a big help I had been waiting for, for a looong time. It motivates me to study the function source code and trying to create a similar function for two rotated beams connection. I hope I can save some time for it.

It's not a quick and dirty version for nothing

The core math comes from the 8860 animation and it only works with joint parts that are oriented in the Z direction.

I followed all step of your "usage howto" in this thread and the script rotated not only the desired halves of uni-joint but the other ones as well, fortunately it was easy to fix (rotate them by 180°). See attached picture.

Don't know what goes wrong, I tried the same setup and it works for me. Just be sure a selection is the 3 joint parts and a destination point (usually the next joint's first part).

A script that does both in one go would be much better for these constructions otherwise you'll have to do one of the joints twice to correct for the roll difference (like discussed above).

Such a script would need a selection of all 6 joint parts and the destination axle.

You could also let it automatically add an axle with the correct length in the middle of the two joints.

1. in fact, the script/function is completely useless without this forum thread knowledge. For "production version", can you add a help message?
2. we can see here why I requested a feature of >1 selection(s) (i.e. different colors of selection highlight or a script asking interactively for each selection) - if impossible with LDCAD 1.6, may you think about it for 2.0, please?

1. I could add a message before execution, but that would be annoying once you know how it works.

2. 2.0 will indeed be much more integrated with the scripting engine.