by Eduardo Virueña Silva
Superspirograph was another geared toy that was used to draw beautiful designs. In this case, the disc was not confined to a ring, it rolled in a given closed path. The path was made with line segments and arcs that were assembled together. Of course, you could assemble several arcs to form a ring and you would have a spirograph then.
I found this photograph of a SuperSpirograph in Internet.
Computers can simulate a superspirograph [even though it is not as simple as it seems]. The making of the path, and to make the disc to roll on it, is an interesting problem. You can make your own sketches after reading this tutorial.
You may find also interesting to play with the spirograph to understand the concepts of disc, deviation, hole, increment, etc.
You may need GhostScript and GhostView or Adobe's Acrobat Reader for displaying or printing your designs.
To create a .PDF file of a superspirogram, enter the description of your design in the next text window:You can also "cut & paste" in the text dialog above the description of any design (green link below the design) of the gallery.
Perhaps you will find interesting these images I made. They all have their descriptions that you will find following the link at the bottom of each one of them.
Click on the images to get them in .PDF format. You can use GhostScript and GhostView or Adobe's Acrobat Reader for displaying or printing them.
Sometimes, when these images are printed in a large format [11"x17" or greater], interference patterns may appear, i. e., human eye can see colors that are not present in the drawing, v. gr. 5hearts seems to have yellow, but it does not.
 penta2 [144Kb] |
 penta3 [140Kb] |
 penta5 [74Kb] |
 flower [74Kb] |
 5bones [304Kb] |
 triang [62Kb] |
 5hearts [256Kb] |
 e [272Kb] |
 hilbert1 [288Kb] |
 hilbert2 [512] |
 sierpinski1 [672Kb] |
 sierpinski2[704Kb] |
 6wbeans[464Kb] |
 flower5[464Kb] |
 seven7[464Kb] |
 seven8[464Kb] |
 sevenhearts[464Kb] |
This page have been visited many times since March 11th, 2005.
There is a wonderful page explaining the mathematical concepts of the spirograph with brilliant animations in Java; take a look to the page of our friend, Prof. Aquiles Páramo Fonseca, in Colombia.
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