It's rotating in one plane.

What if you need rotational motion in all three degrees of freedom?

How would you produce that?

That's what we're going to talk about in this video, and we use a rod-end ball joint, which is this piece of hardware right here.

You can see that there's this joint, it's like a ball joint inside that moves very smoothly and freely.

Some of them don't move quite as freely as this one, at least not until they've been broken in, kind of loosened up a little bit, but ultimately you have this really smooth, very controlled motion in three degrees of rotational freedom.

What would happen typically is you'll have some kind of a shaft that gets placed through the center of that ball, and now this shaft can move in three degrees of freedom.

You might put some retaining rings or something, like right here, so that axially the shaft cannot move, and it's locked in there axially, but rotationally it's free to move this way.

That would be one degree of freedom, like that.

Another degree, second degree of freedom would be like that, and then third degree of freedom would be spinning, like that.

These rod-end ball joints, they're also called heim joints sometimes, these produce that type of rotational freedom in three different degrees.

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