Trig. Calculator

Kinda limited, donchathink?

The Fadal Function/utility for circles, blends, intersections, etc. is really pretty nifty, albeit somewhat non-intuitive, so's you gotta muckymuck around a bit.

Their triangle function is really perty neat, *not limited to right triangles*, AND gives the circumscribed circle -- or, you can give it the circumscribed circle, etc.

What I would like to find is something like what is in the fadal utility, ito blends etc, that's just a little clearer -- and in a cleaner environment. :)

I would assume that all cadcam would have all these utilities, but mebbe not??

Didn't fadal have some software for the pc that emulated their 88 control, and this stuff? And some kind of toolpath verification ditty??

fwiw, you can program all this stuff in a spreadsheet as well (the plural you, of course, but of course excluding jb), as really "all" that is being done is solving simultaneous equations for the geometry at hand.

Some of it is tricky, tho, but the advantage is being able to program in specific things of interest for repetitive calcs, such as dropping balls in V's, and calc'ing touch points, or the height of the bottom of the ball from the V tip, or the Z value for flats on balls, etc.

The fadal will do this as well, but boyoboy, you be scratchin yer head fer a while....

PV:

It's just a right triangle solver, and the price is right. LOL

I played with the Fadal utilities about 12 years ago just to see what they were about, but never use them now. I also have a graphics calculator that shows a little right triangle with the sides and angles labeled, it also does bolt circles and other stuff. I don't use that either. Like you infer, the CAM system can do most all the calculations you need, although they may not be in the Fadal utilities form you're familiar with. In the normal course of the type of CAM programming we do, you don't have to do many external calculations, but I do occasionally draw up bolt circles with dimensions to print out to give to the manual guys. Besides, I don't like standing up at a machine control to do calculations when I can sit down at the computer. Ya want to get flat feet, or what?

You'd just draw your "V" then draw the diameter ball you want tangent to the "V", and interrogate the CAM system for all data points you need.

Here are some more calculators.