Funky Psychedelic Bicycle Wheel

When you click the button marked 'draw pretty patterns' in the spoke pattern explorer part of the WheelCalc spoke length calculator you will see the bike wheel display replaced with an animated version of the graphic on the left.

Originally I just wrote this to test that a user accidentally entering impossible or silly values for hub / rim dimensions or an impossible number of spokes or spoke crossings would result in an impossible / silly looking bicycle wheel display instead of causing the program to crash with a division by zero error or similar. My original intention was to remove this option from WheelCalc because all it does is draw pretty patterns and these aren't of much use to a wheel builder or bike mechanic. However I showed it to some of my friends and they all liked it so much that I decided to leave it in and develop an enhanced colour cycling version for use within a screen saver.

You can attempt to build the wheel shown on the left if you want to but I don't recommend it! The more serious wheel building usage of checking if you have exceeded the maximum number of spoke crossings is explained here