You have to really like slide rules to build your own, including the necessary artwork. Apparently [Dylan Thinnes] is a big fan, based on this project he began working on a few months back. The result is a set of algorithms that automatically generates most of the scales that were common on slide rules back in the day. For example:
K Cubic scale, x^3
A,B Squared scale, x^2
C,D Basic scale, x
CI,DI Inverted scale, 1/x
CF,DF Folded scale, x*pi
LLn Log-log scales, e^a*x
LL0n Log-log scales, e^-a*x
L Log scale, log10(x), linear
S Sine and cosines scale, sin(x)
T Tangent scale, tan(x)
If you’ve ever tried to manually draw an axis using a computer program — attempting to automatically set reasonable tick marks, grids, and labels — you can appreciate that this is a non-trivial problem. [Dylan] tackled things from the bottom up, developing several utility functions that work in concert to iteratively build up each scale. One advantage of this approach, he says, is that you can quite easily build almost any scale you want. We’re going to take his word on that, because the project is not easily accessible to the average programmer. As [Dylan] notes:
At the moment it’s still a library w/ no documentation, and written in a relatively obscure language called Haskell, so it’s really only for the particularly determined.
The project is published on his GitHub repository, and sample scales and demo program are available. Without knowledge of obscure languages and being on ..
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