Three programs have been written to simulate deployable rings. The first simulates Guest's square deployable ring.
The second simulates rectangular rings.
And the third plots the mechanism paths of the rectangular rings. The red and blue lines are the paths, and the black line is a measure of how 'good' the blue path is - if the blue and red paths become proximate then the black line lowers.
The hinge angles are along the x and y axes, and the mechanism is open when it passes through the horizontal and vertical lines. When these lines are red the mechanism definitely won't work. When they are green it will probably work. See the report for more details.
Windows binaries and the source code (requires Qt4) can be downloaded here. Left-drag to rotate, right-drag or mouse wheel to zoom, and middle click to switch between compatible solutions for the rectangular rings.
The project report is available here.
Tim Hutt, 02/06/2007