Hi
I am a senior mechanical engineering student. For my senior project I wrote a program that simulates McPherson geometry.
It is quite crude and has many bugs but I would be interested in input from people who know suspension kinematics. I have no great claim to fame with either Matlab programming or suspension geometry. I did this project to gain a better understanding of suspension kinematics. I know that using the method of jacobians would have been a lot easier and much more elegant but I wanted to get a better intuitive sense for suspension kinematics.
I have a few questions
1. Is there a closed form solution to finding the correct tie rod length to minimize bump steer
2. When tabbing through Matlab GUI how do I make it highlight the next entry?

Below is a link to my web page.
You have to have a copy of Matlab to run it.
http://homepages.wwc.edu/student/robepa/

Cheers
Paul
Robepa at wwc.edu

1. bump steer will contain a couple more parameters depending on what the setup is, if you can move the rack distance, legnth, etc. I just did a quick google and you might want toi play with this excel program http://www.bevenyoung.com.au/baseline.htm

2. LImited Matlab programming, but from what I remember to view a tabbed tool, click the tool's tab. The tool moves to the foreground and becomes the currently active window. When you click the close box for a tool that is part of a group of tools tabbed together, that tool closes. You cannot close all the tabbed tools at one time; instead close each tool individually. (from the guide). Not sure if this answers your question.

Did you get a chance to run the program?
The tab problem I am having is that in the finished GUI you want to be able to enter a value, press tab and have it highlight the entry in the next box so it deletes it. My problem is that in the finished GUI when I press tab it places the cursor in front of the value instead of highlighting it.
Cheers
Paul

My matlab 6.5 is busted, i got 7.0 waiting to be installed, i'll let you know.