This paper presents a software toolkit for performing motion analysis of mechanical systems. It is developed in Ch, a C/C++ interpreter, and can be integrated as an add-on in Excel spreadsheets, thus taking advantage of both the widespread diffusion of Excel and its friendly user interface. The toolkit consists of a series of scripts that can be embedded in an Excel worksheet; each script performs either a particular motion analysis function or a general-purpose task, such as initializing data or populating arrays. The scripts can be freely concatenated in order to solve a specific motion analysis problem. Originally developed as a student project at University of California, Davis, in its present state, the toolkit is easy to use, well documented, and freely downloadable (http://www.softintegration.com/download/).

Written in the style of a research paper, the paper explains why the project was started and its theoretical background, with plenty of references to other works; on the other hand, it details in a very clear and informative manner how to use the toolkit, so that it can used almost as a user manual. For these reasons, this scientific paper is useful even outside of an academic environment, to practitioners needing advanced tools to perform their jobs.