On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 15:10:46 -0400, Ken McIsaac
wrote:

The trick is the "at most". I just wanted flat at both ends and the
curve in between equally distributed. At the risk of dwelling on it:
f(x)=6x^5 - 15x^4 + 10x^3 between x=0 and x=1 is the function I
settled on.

Neat!!

It's not as strange as all that, and I probably could have achieved
the same thing with a set of french splines. This way, I got to tell
myself I was "woodworking" when what I was actually doing was
playing with Matlab. I got to have similar fun when I sat down to
plan the angle I needed to cut a desired cove on my table saw. As
always, the doing was much harder than the math.

I use Mupad for something more dramatic, but will stick to simpler
programs, usually preferring to figure by hand. My brother in law was
a draftsman, and left me some of his tools. One "French curve" is in
the shape of a babe. I'm afraid to handle her too much ...too
distracting, so she sits in a drawer.

I did find myself a cheap (free) CAD package, but I found it very hard
to use. My (minimal) CAD training is 15 years old, and at that time,
you typed in the coordinates of the points you wanted and the machine
drew it for you. These days, apparently, it's all about starting with
blank shapes and doing cutting planes or rotations on them. This is
not how my brain works at all.

Do try Deltacad. It's very intuitive. All have a learning curve, but
this one is relatively slight. Recently I drew up a model of our
front door that I have to rebuild. Just rectangles and a few lines
and dimensions are figured automatically. The end product is
infinitely neater than I could draw or sketch.

Bill.