Tester Instructions

The Tester applet is accessed through Bust It!(the tester) and lets you analyze a structure. You can apply a weight on a structure, and the forces applied to each beam will be calculated.

To start off with, you need to load a structure to test. Either select a name from the list that appears and click "Load from list", or type in a name and click "Load from name". Please be patient as this may take a while, depending on how busy the server is.

To set the load on a joint, select the joint by clicking on it, then click "Set Load". You will be prompted for a number to represent the magnitude of the load.

Click "Test Structure" to test the structure.

The structure will be displayed with the beams color-coded. Brighter colors signify a higher load on a beam, fading towards black as the load becomes less. Green colors represent compression forces, and purple colors represent tension. Beams with no load are colored blue.

To select a beam, click on a joint that it is connected to. The first beam created to that joint will be highlighted. Click the back or forward arrows surrounding the word "Beam" to move backwards or forwards (respectively) through the beams in the order they were created. As a beam is highlighted, information about it is displayed, including the exact load exerted on it.

We understand that on some systems you may have difficulty running our applets (even if your web-browser is java-capable) depending on OS/Video/memory complications. Hopefully these occasions will be rare, but if it does happen all we can suggest is that you download the most current version of your browser and experiment with it a bit. This seems especially true for the Mac version of Netscape Navigator. Using version 3.0 has solved many problems.

If you want our technical advice on getting it to work email us with as much information about your computer as possible and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.