Online Spirograph Tool | Hacker News Reader

Online Spirograph Tool

nathanfriend.io

120 pointseygt21 comments

Hey, author here! Fun to see this old project pop up on HN. Happy to answer any questions.

Last year I tried my hand at building a native mobile version for iOS and Android (using Flutter), which is a little more polished and has a few extra features (for example, irregular-shaped gears): https://inspiral.nathanfriend.io/

Absolutely wonderful. I noticed that the disc-shaped gears have teeth on the inside and outside. How do you get a gear to revolve around the outside of the disc?

Unfortunately it's not possible! It's the number one question people email me about. In retrospect I should have rendered the ring gears with no teeth on the outside.

I love this! Thank you. I’m curious if you know of something similar for producing harmonographs? Or maybe this is even a subtype of harmonography. I was really inspired by John Whitney’s book “Digital Harmony”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonograph

I don't! Those look amazing, though.

Yea this is marvelous. I tried doing a spirograph thing way, way back (Atari 800 days), but could never get the math to work.

Cool. Input to developer: offer gear numbers that are co-prime (or absolute primes) to each other. Results in maximum number of circles until you return to the original point.

Thanks! I chose the same set of gears that shipped with the original Spirograph. Also note that you can achieve a similar effect by pressing "," or ".", which offsets the gear by one tooth, and then re-drawing the complete design.

Ah, I remember this from Chrome Experiments...cool to see it's still up.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141103062434/http://www.chromee...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_Experiments

Edit:

Huh, just noticed that Geoguessr was also a Chrome Experiment. I wonder what others gained traction? I also remember A Dark Room, for one.

A Wikipedia search reveals an OK Go music video and a short film...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22Chrome+Experi...

Did you know there is a direct correlation between the decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about it…

In all seriousness though, this is a cute and fun tool. I actually played with Spirographs a lot as a wee one.

That was my favorite game when I was a kid <3

This is a lot of fun. I discovered that you can click-spin the inner gear to rotate it in place without drawing (so you can keep your place to start with a new radius hole).

https://i.imgur.com/MFB5BkK.png

This is not working for me.

Weird, what browser/OS are you using?

Latest Firefox on Debian 10

Edit: Nevermind, my security settings prevented the font download. Not your app's fault.

Kudos to author for making it work in somewhat old browsers! But... are there any offline non-js (ok, C) analogs? :)

Not C, but I did build a mobile app version that works offline: https://inspiral.nathanfriend.io/

This is straight up terrific. When I was a boy in the early 1970s I had a Spirograph and I just loved it.

That was a lot of fun! Thank you.

This is lovely!

This is fun! :D

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