Task 3: Weighing the Old Way
The old way was to compare an unknown weight with known weights by manually adding/removing the known weights until a balance point was reached. The new (or modern) way is to place the unknown weight on the weighpan of a 'blackbox' and read off the weight from a digital LCD display ( an electronic load cell does all the work). I chose to simulate the Triple-Beam Balance, whereby an object is weighed by adjusting three sliding known weights along their respective bars (or beams). I did this because it amply illustrate a well-known principle of physics called "The First Law of Levers" :-
As in Task2, I assembled the beam balance within the 3DRad Virtual Editor from components built in an external modelling application.
A real fun part of this exercise was building and applying the realtime environment map to the weighpan and other silver components of the balance........this is something that 3Drad really excells at ! I built the environment map using the free ATI CubeMap Generator tool, applying six views (top,bottom,front,back,left,right) of the room to the sphere surface:
A real fun part of this exercise was building and applying the realtime environment map to the weighpan and other silver components of the balance........this is something that 3Drad really excells at ! I built the environment map using the free ATI CubeMap Generator tool, applying six views (top,bottom,front,back,left,right) of the room to the sphere surface:
An experimenter requires a means of recording his/her results........so for this task a simple Notebook has been provided
A problem that I did have was physics-related. As the beam of the balance swung downwards, the horizontal component of the gravitational force came into action, increasing as the angle of the beam increased. This caused the slider weights to creep forward on the beam, thus feeding the whole process further ! To remedy this, I had to counteract with equal and opposite forces. I can understand now why real-life scales have notches at each graduation mark !
I am sure that this task would have taken me months using the more traditional programming approach.......the use of 3DRad just streamlines everything and removes all the drudgery, letting one just get on with the task at hand. The actual weighing of objects is not as precise as I would have liked, but it does demonstrate quite nicely the working of a real-life balance. For best results, run this application at a screen resolution of 1024x768 or 800x600
I am sure that this task would have taken me months using the more traditional programming approach.......the use of 3DRad just streamlines everything and removes all the drudgery, letting one just get on with the task at hand. The actual weighing of objects is not as precise as I would have liked, but it does demonstrate quite nicely the working of a real-life balance. For best results, run this application at a screen resolution of 1024x768 or 800x600
| virtualworkbench_task3_install.zip |