Dan(v/c/g)er's Nametag!

I have a good friend and coworker named Danver, and I started thinking about his name. His name is just a one letter swap from Danger, and also a one letter swap from Dancer.

I imagined a wheel rotating with the letters G V and C on it, in the middle of his name, and then imagined all the other letters on wheels turning too. I started sketching, and I came up with this geared design -

The big gear in the center switches between V,C, and G, and the gear on the end shows different icons that Danver worships. There's Star Trek, Burning Man, a Cocktail, Doctor Who, Electronic Daisy Carnival, GoLang, an Anchor, and the symbol for the Python language.

I wanted each unique combination of Danver/Dancer/Danger to be possible with each icon, in a sane number of turns. This turned out to be quite a fun problem! The proportion of teeth between different gears dictate how far they'll turn relative to each other, for instance, if there's a gear with 10 teeth, and a gear with 13 teeth, if you turn the 13 toothed gear one complete rotation, the 10 toothed gear will have turned 13/10 times, or about 1/3rd extra.

I wrote a python program to simulate all the different plausible tooth ratios, and simulate turning them, first to help me understand how the different gear ratios interacted, and then to help me find the optimum one for my design.

Here's the program! danversimulate.py

And here's a video explaining it, and showing it in action!

Done ~ April 2017 at Noisebridge Hackerspace