simple animation

Hi John,

your best bet for animated illustrations on how basic machinery operates is Adobe Animate. This is, roughly speaking, a vector-based animation application. Adobe's official description:

Design interactive vector and bitmap animations for games, apps and the web. Bring cartoons and banner ads to life. And add action to tutorials and infographics. With Animate, you can quickly publish content to reach viewers on desktop, mobile and TV.

Animate offers good tools to create vector graphics, it has a Timeline where you can set up Tween Animations, These are property changes between Keyframes, like width, height, x, y, scaleX, scaleY and more. It also allows frame-by-frame animations and something called Shape Tweens, you can use to achieve kind of morphing from one shape to another.

Adobe Apps nowadays come in a subscription context. Basically one could say you subscribe to software on a monthly payment deal. The cost for Animate is currently £19.97/mo. This is in British Pound where I am.

Have a look at Creative Cloud Plans & Pricing to decide for yourself which Creative Cloud Plan would be best for you.

I hope I could help a bit

Klaus