Canfield Joints in POVray

Last June, Kirk Sorenson wrote a blog post at Selenian Boondocks about Canfield Joints. These devices enable pointing a rocket nozzle or solar panel anywhere within a hemisphere.

Part of the problem he had in describing the Canfield Joint is due to the fact that the thing operates in three dimensions, making visualization difficult with 2-D images. Over the last several years I've been using POVray to do 3D designs and animations, and I realized that a character skeleton system I published last year (bones.inc) would also work well for Canfield Joints.

So, I did a little math (OK, a LOT of math) and came up with a short POVray program that can do 3D animation of Canfield joints. The program is included in the bones.inc zip file, and the results are shown in the video below.


Given the three base angles for a Canfield joint, the software automatically calculates all the rest of the angles and the position and orientation of the distal plate. An arbitrary number of Canfield joints can be linked in series and manipulated. Now anyone with POVray can design and visualize their own Canfield joints in operation.