crcarlson

Thank you for the comments, we will definitely be using these to drive the next set of feature developments.

Just FYI, the snapshot is a .png screenshot and we can definitely clarify that better. There is also a saveAs which saves in our own format and ultimately will save to each of the various PM formats.

Thank you for taking the time to test drive. We are saving these comments and will use them to drive our next set of features and feature improvements.

Oh yeah, I see it now. Thanks.

This is a great point. We currently import from MS Proj but we don't yet fully export. I agree with you that it would lower the friction to starting up if it was guaranteed painless to transition back or work with other tools. This feature is on our near term roadmap.

One of our hypotheses is that there is a market for visualization tools for PMs - mostly because the tools out there tend to focus on organization and analysis but not on presentation as an important aspect of communication. We are starting out as an addition/plugin on top of existing tools but if we do a good job it possible we could ultimately end up as a stand-alone app as well.

We definitely didn't pay anyone for this privilege.

Yeah, that site is neat. Our current goal is to build interactive presentations for different sets of schedule data, so not quite the same thing.

Thanks, this is a good data point. Yes corporate users are definitely our audience. The users we have talked to so far have had Flash or were able to get it. The reason we are posting is to get different points of view, so this is useful feedback.

Maxon will occasionally donate motors to students in my experience, but I have not found them to be particularly generous with hobbiests and their motors tend to be fairly pricey.

You might consider the motor control packages from this guy http://www.kelinginc.net/index.html or similar. They close the loop for you and you position your motor based on a pulse train which can be generated by a variety of devices. The step-direction control of the servo does tend to generate more vibration than other kinds of inputs, but is very easy to interface with.

There are others vendors as well, just search for hobby cnc and servo and examples will pop up. Advanced Motion Control also offers servo amplifiers which take other forms of input than step and direction which might be quieter.

As mentioned before, gear boxes are a big producer of noise as are powertrains in general. Toothed Belt drives, especially at low speeds or capstan drives for finite rotation machines can be very quiet.

To figure out your motor sizing you need to estimate the speeds and forces / torques on your system. From there you can estimate the power your system needs to produce and then calculate a gear-ratio based on the available motor torques and powers available from off the shelf devices. Maxon's catalog has design rules, equations and worked examples if you want samples of the math.

For what it is worth, I would guess that the Kelling 350W motors would be able to move a 2KG mass with what looks to be high accelerations and speeds with a decently designed drivetrain.