This is so cool! Do you know if anyone ever wrote a general-purpose "how to program with mechanical parts" kind of resource? I've seen technical manuals for specific machines (like the navy's Basic Fire Control Mechanisms, OP 1140), but haven't found anything more general.
One excellent encyclopedia of mechanisms is "Mechanisms in Modern Engineering Design", Ivan I. Artobelevsky, USSR Academy of Science. Translated by Nicholas Weinstein. 7 volumes in the Internet Archive at the attached link.
Also, Cornell University hosts the Reuleaux Collection of Mechanisms and Machines. They used to have an excellent online resource with descriptions of each mechanism, animations of how they operate, and even downloadable CAD models. But then Web 3.0 happened and static websites were no longer in fashion, so it was taken offline for a refresh which was never completed. There are still some remnants available on archive.org.
I haven't seen a guide like that, but it would be interesting. It amazes me that they were able to get the CADC to work, since it is a complicated 3-D task to get all the gears to mesh without colliding. Since the gears need to be in particular ratios, there are a lot of constraints. The clearances in the CADC are very tight, by the way. It was hard to reverse-engineer because many gears looked like they meshed, but they didn't quite mesh.
