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hkc
This is fun! :D
diegolo
That was my favorite game when I was a kid <3
nfriend
Hey, author here! Fun to see this old project pop up on HN. Happy to answer any questions.

Last year I tried my hand at building a native mobile version for iOS and Android (using Flutter), which is a little more polished and has a few extra features (for example, irregular-shaped gears): https://inspiral.nathanfriend.io/

cantrevealname
Absolutely wonderful. I noticed that the disc-shaped gears have teeth on the inside and outside. How do you get a gear to revolve around the outside of the disc?
nfriend
Unfortunately it's not possible! It's the number one question people email me about. In retrospect I should have rendered the ring gears with no teeth on the outside.
dr_dshiv
I love this! Thank you. I’m curious if you know of something similar for producing harmonographs? Or maybe this is even a subtype of harmonography. I was really inspired by John Whitney’s book “Digital Harmony”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonograph

nfriend
I don't! Those look amazing, though.
whartung
Yea this is marvelous. I tried doing a spirograph thing way, way back (Atari 800 days), but could never get the math to work.
cgufus
Cool. Input to developer: offer gear numbers that are co-prime (or absolute primes) to each other. Results in maximum number of circles until you return to the original point.
nfriend
Thanks! I chose the same set of gears that shipped with the original Spirograph. Also note that you can achieve a similar effect by pressing "," or ".", which offsets the gear by one tooth, and then re-drawing the complete design.
dhimes
That was a lot of fun! Thank you.
mobilene
This is straight up terrific. When I was a boy in the early 1970s I had a Spirograph and I just loved it.
lostgame
Did you know there is a direct correlation between the decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about it…

In all seriousness though, this is a cute and fun tool. I actually played with Spirographs a lot as a wee one.

quercusa
This is a lot of fun. I discovered that you can click-spin the inner gear to rotate it in place without drawing (so you can keep your place to start with a new radius hole).
IYasha
Kudos to author for making it work in somewhat old browsers! But... are there any offline non-js (ok, C) analogs? :)