Shiny Application Project Sales Pitch

When I was a child (far too long ago!) I was given a gift one Christmas of a toy that was all the rage at the time … a Spirograph.

I was a nerd in heaven! Especially since no one else in the family ever seemed to want to play with it. This is a very important point when you are the smallest in the family and claiming something as your own can be a battle

As I have been exploring the World of R I came across a wonderful blog by another user as he explores this world as well and introduced me to a very similar mathematical construct called a “Harmonograph”. You can read about about it here. Ripples: Very Small Waves in R

Mathematically a Harmonograph creates its images based on the movement of one or more damped pendulums with the following formulae:

\[ x(t) = A_1\sin(tf_1 + p_1) e^{-d_1t}) + A_2\sin(tf_2 + p_2) e^{-d_2t}\\ \\ y(t) = A_3\sin(tf_3 + p_3) e^{-d_3t}) + A_4\sin(tf_4 + p_4) e^{-d_4t} \] where \[ f = frequency, \\ p = phase, \\ A = amplitude, \\ d = damping, \\t = time \]

Simply go to my shiny.io account site

ShinyApps:wpmcdonald

and play with moidfying a few of the variables

Next we'll try working out the formula for the classic Spirograph which describes a similar sinusoidal path though based more on the relative size of two circles.