finished researching and started the cad! looked into types of linear actuators (transmission systems) and found that only two were really viable: racket and pinion system, or timing belt. the con of the timing belt was that cad-ing it would be more difficult and the belt would need to be tensioned, so i decided on racket and pinion, with the con being higher inertia of the carriage. then i looked into rail types, with aluminum extrusions with v-rails vs linear rails. linear rails are a lot more expensive ive found but it fits into budget and are more rigid and more common on designs i see, so i will go with that. after a lot of hunting and fumbling with trying to look at products on misumi, i found that hgr20 rails are the cheapest rigid rails to get. also looked into encoders and decided that my requirements for an encoder would be an absolute magnetic encoder that’s at least 12 bit. i think designing my own custom esc is rather unnecessary for this project, so i’ll stick with finding one probably. found a lot of important resources for this design: https://www.drdflo.com/pages/Guides/How-to-Build-a-3D-Printer/FFF.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eIE23vJcI4 http://willbeattie.ca/post/engineering/pendulum/