Re: Good documentation (arc length?)
- Posted by Shian_Lee Apr 02, 2015
- 2118 views
Special request from Tom or anyone else:
I would like to know the way to calculate the length of an arc. (arc of a circle or ellipse).
There are many ways to do it, but unfortunately the last time I applied to work for NASA I was rejected. I guess that I'm not good enough.
So, what I need is: an accurate, simple, fast, practical, proven way to calculate the length of an arc.
I already found my own way to do it, when I wrote the program for an iron cutting machine. But, obviously there is a better way.
I've tried all those formulas from the Internet - but the most accurate formulas gave me really strange results that I could not understand (it might be good for flying to the moon, but not really what I needed). Other formulas gave me not accurate results.
The cutting machine has to move exactly between each 0.1mm points of an arc, so I needed a good formula for this.
The best thing that could happen is if an accurate formula was included as a code example for sin() or cos() - since it's a very useful task, but seems to be an impossible mission.
I hope that I don't talk nonsense here.
Thank you.
ps: I forgot to mention that important part of the MS-QuickBasic documentation was a directory of valuable example-programs.
EDIT: BTW, I was looking now in Wikipedia, it seems that lots of new articles were written since the time that I was looking for Arc-Length. Yet, I'm still wondering if those new(?) formulas are accurate enough.
