My neighbour is an half-retired entrepreneur who still runs his electric engine company. A few weekends ago, he came to me with the following physics question related with one of those engines: given a primary disk rotating at the angular speed of ω₀ and a secondary disk located on the first one with a centre O₁, a distance r₀ between both centres, a radius of r₁ and a relative angular speed of ω₁, what is the absolute speed of a point M on the periphery of the secondary disk? Since I could not make sense of the solutions given in Wikipedia, I wrote a small (and crude) R code to show the location of M and to derive an approximation to the speed… Any suggestion for improvement is welcome!

#location of the second centre A
a=function(t,R=c(2,1),om=c(1,13)){
   sum(R)*c(cos(om[2]*t),sin(om[2]*t))}
#location of the peripheral point M
b=function(t,R=c(2,1),om=c(1,13)){
  a(t,R,om)+R[1]*c(cos(om[1]*t),sin(om[1]*t))}
#plot of the location of M as above
draw_position=function(R=c(1,2), om=c(3,1), phi=c(0,0) ){
position=function(t,index,R=c(1,2),om=c(3,1),phi=c(0,0)){
 relative_position=function(){
 return(list(R[index]*cos(om[index]*t+phi[index]),R[index]*sin(om[index]*t+phi[index])))
 }
 if(index == 1){
 return(relative_position() )
 } else {
 p1=position(t,index-1,R=R,om=om,phi=phi)
 p2=relative_position()
 return(list(p1[[1]]+p2[[1]],p1[[2]]+p2[[2]]))
 }}
 tes=seq(0,2*pi,length=10**3)
 xy_range=c(-1,1)*sum(abs(R))
 plot(0,0,pch="x",xlim=xy_range,ylim=xy_range,axes=F,xlab="",ylab="")
 pA=position(tes,1,R,om,phi)
 pB=position(tes,2,R,om,phi)
 lines(pB[[1]],pB[[2]],pch=19,cex=.4,col="tomato")
 lines(pA[[1]],pA[[2]],pch=19,cex=.2,col="blue")
 }
draw_position(om=c(1,30))
#angle at time t
the=function(t,R=c(2,1),om=c(1,13)){
  bb=b(t,R=R,om=om)
  bb=bb/sqrt(sum(bb^2))
  theta=acos(bb[1])
  if (bb[2]  theta}
#angular speed at time t
#by very crude differenciating
dthe=function(t,R=c(2,1),om=c(1,13)){
     dtes=mean(diff(tes))
    (the(t+dtes)-the(t-dtes))/(2*dtes)}
#new plot
plot(apply(as.matrix(tes),1,dthe,om=c(-55,2)),type="l",ylim=c(-2*pi,pi))

Antoine Dreyer actually contributed to improve the above code from an earlier version and he also derived the (Cartesian) components of the speed for me:

and

if O₁(0) has polar coordinates (r₀,φ₀) and M(0) has polar coordinates (r₁,φ₁) with respect to O₁(0).