  We describe the main ingredients needed to create, from the smooth lagrangian
density, a variational principle for discrete motions of a discrete rod, with
corresponding conserved Noether currents. We describe all geometrical objects
in terms of elements on the linear Atiyah bundle, using a reduced forward
difference operator. We show how this introduces a discrete lagrangian density
that models the discrete dynamics of a discrete rod. The presented tools are
general enough to represent a discretization of any variational theory in
principal bundles, and its simplicity allows to perform an iterative
integration algorithm to compute the discrete rod evolution in time, starting
from any predefined configurations of all discrete rod elements at initial
times.
