Introduction: Pendulum Art on a Spread Sheet.

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What is normally done using mechanical pendulums can also be done on a spread sheet. If the spread sheet also provides the slider function, this can provide much greater controls over the various pendulum parameters.

Step 1:

The spreadsheet in OpenOffice does provide a working slider control which can set the value of a given cell.

Step 2:

The slider can also be stepped by smaller units for some precision adjustments.

Step 3:

This is a simplified mechanical pendulum simulation which graphs the X/Y points
versus time.

Step 4:

In this case the X values has frequency, magnitude, decay, and phase parameters which follows this equation.

X = Magnitude*Exp(-time/decay_rate)*sin(2pi*frequency*time + PhaseShift*time)

Step 5:

Of course the equations need not be limited to this simple example.

Step 6:

The slider controls provide instance feedback as to what each parameter is doing.

Step 7:

Both the OpenOffice and Excel version are included. The Excel version unfortunately appears to have problems getting its slider controls to work properly, at least on a MacBookPro. If you download the Openoffice version, the file's extension my need to be changed to something like "FWVEAA8FR123iEH.ods".