When thinking about design and manufacturing systems, I've found feedback loops to be clarifying. Starting out, everyone seems to know that waterfall development is bad and that something like a V model is better, but beyond PowerPoint both leave a lot out. In this post I'll share how they are constructed and how I use them to communicate development tasks. Feedback loops # Take an input, perform…
Zoo is an interesting startup building, essentially, a SAAS API for mechanical CAD operations, or as their website says " Zoo creates infrastructure for hardware design ". In this post I'd like to talk through their text-to-CAD product which leverages that SAAS backend, and what this approach to design tooling means for hardware engineers. What is Zoo's text-to-CAD application? # If I ask you to…
See this post on Substack Today, January 16th, is Mechanomy's fifth birthday. It's hard to say more than that, not because there haven’t been ups and downs, but because so much remains pending, awaiting fuller realization. The best things have been getting prototype tools to work, often in some new language or library, which further proves my vision for Mechanomy and says, 'well these parts are…
CAD modeling involves many repeated commands, but in Solidworks these four operations were so annoying that we wrote some simple macros to automate them. Grab them from https://github.com/mechanomy/SolidworksScripts , being sure to add them to your macro file locations and mapping them to shortcut keys . addAxesXYZ # When you make a new part or assembly, or load a part from a vendor, it frequently…
The past year's advances in image synthesis (DALL-E, MidJourney) and large language models (LLMs, ChatGPT) have been truly exciting and have given many the occasion to look towards the future in a new way. Not to be left out, many designers and engineers have asked how these advances will change the way we design, develop, and manufacture products, asking whether they will help us, pass us by, or…
One of the consistent themes of this new century is the pining for the yester-years, when problems were many, tools were accessible, and manufacturing and labor were cheap, resulting in manifold companies, patents, innovations, and rising standards of living. There are many reasons that we should not expect that to return; as Robert Gordon says: "The 1870-1970 century was unique: many of these…
3D animation is an essential tool for developing and debugging physical systems because it allows developers to use their highly-trained eyes and experience of the physical world to look for modeling errors. Yet animation is overlooked by many Modelica tools; they may have a basic capability but most of their development/UX effort is elsewhere. The problem is twofold: experienced developers work…
How quickly can customers evaluate product suitability? # Suppose a potential customer visits a manufacturer's website, but they are unsure whether the products are suitable for their application. What can a manufacturer do to validate their interest, to reassure them that the manufacturer's website and products are worth evaluating and worth sharing with their development team? While that…
I attended the 2023 Automate show this past Monday and again enjoyed seeing much of the automation industry condensed into one hall. Alongside IMTS, there really is no other US-based event that does as good of a job of showcasing the variety conveyance, industrial robot, vision, control, and service providers as this show. And while Mechanomy focuses on the design side of manufacturing, the…
Jason at Fireball Tool is a fabricator and a demanding tool user/builder; he's previously tested the failure modes of shop vises, which left him wanting a better shop vise, resulting in the HardTail vise . To show its capability, in this video he builds a vise torture test rig around a swinging hammer. For this MonthlyMechanism I'll model the Vise Hammer in Modelica to estimate the impact energy…
With Christmas coming this Monthly Mechanism looks at a former gift to anticipate the challenge of shopping for and giving tools. One of the perennial frustrations with a adjustable wrenches is dialing in the right jaw position so that you can snugly grip the bolt while also being able to index the wrench to the next face. Crescent's RapidSlide adjustable wrench attempted to solve this by using a…
In this #monthlyMechanism we write a simple Julia package to model compressive springs. Springs, of course, are a fundamental machine component and they are well-explained by mechanics. I'm using Fundamentals of Machine Elements as a reference, but many others exist . The material and shape of a spring completely describe its function, which is summarized by the spring stiffness constant (spring…
One of the joys of attending trade shows is seeing machines in-person; at IMTS last month I spent a bit of time looking at the mechanical design of Renishaw's Equator gauging machine and want to share some observations for this MonthlyMechanism . As I have some experience in delta robot design, here are some highlights and conjectures on the design of the Renishaw Equator 300. The Equator is a…
When I first began Mechanomy I spent some time building composer.mechanomy.com , a web-based environment for simulating Modelica models. I've just turned it on again and invite you to try it, though it's still very alpha. I thought that few engineers knew that tools like Modelica existed, and that if there were an easy introduction it would be a great point to start talking about how engineers use…
What tools do engineers have to explore new ideas? That is, once you have an idea in your head, what tools do you use to evaluate it? Most hardware engineers turn to sketching and CAD. Sketching (on paper, whiteboards, in CAD) fixes basic concepts and relationships, allowing engineers to focus on particular details, often those required to create a conceptual CAD model. However created, the first…
Gears are foundational to many mechanisms, and it is the involute curve that is responsible for many of their capabilities. In this MonthlyMechanism we're calculating and sketching the involute curve. Many references describe involute curves by analogy to a taut string unwrapping from a cylinder, and some depict a mechanical curve generator. But these physical approaches do not translate into CAD,…
Two months ago I described the differential belt transmission in general terms; this month revisits it in our Moover linear stage project. This project explored several design questions through conceptual prototypes, each varying an aspect of the differential belt transmission. See the Moover project page for detail and video of each stage variant. After that, maybe have a look at our updated…
For July's #MonthlyMechanism , we're modeling a tensegrity table in Modelica: A tensegrity table made by Sphidget , click through to see a can displacing the table. The tensegrity mechanism # 'Tensegrity' is bit of a portmanteau implying the significant or novel use of tensile elements in some structure, they being essential to its structural integrity . I'd recommend clicking through to the tweet…
One of the major annoyances of the startup stage is the need to focus narrowly, starting projects to satisfy an immediate need without a timeline for their completion. The following projects are already useful, yet their development and conceptual completion are unfortunately subject to the needs of our other projects. Describing them here and developing them publicly on GitHub is a small way of…
The differential screw and differential winch Monthly Mechanisms are relatively well and widely known but this month's mechanism is rarely seen: let's look at the differential belt transmission. As conceived by Drachman, rotating the handle clockwise (in Fig1) lowers the x-ray imager. Myron Drachman's 1943 patent appears to be the first description of the idea, wherein a closed chain engages two…
Continuing our MonthlyMechanism series, let's look at the differential winch. The differential winch uses two reels of differing diameter and a pulley to create a large mechanical advantage. At its core are two reels of differing diameter on the same shaft, with the ends of a single cable attached to each. Between the reels the cable circuits a pulley, onto which a load is hung. Note that reels…
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What happens if you put a screw inside a screw? Today we're kicking off a regular series on interesting mechanisms, starting with the differential screw; a very compact mechanism for generating very fine motions. Their small size makes them a bit hard to spot in-the-wild, but these are commonly seen in precise positioners, able to scale finger-knob rotations down to nanometer displacements. For…
Engineers don't often talk about why they do what they do. For instance, the heavy preference for wanting to see something work, whether that be physically in a prototype or virtually in a CAD model. What's obvious but unstated is that this preference is the most direct way to communicate a mental model of a potential system from one person to another. That is, mechanical design engineers are very…
Today I want to share some thoughts on Leo Gall's talk from Day 3 of the Modelica Conference, on the " Continuous Development and Management of Credible Modelica Models " with abstract: Modeling and simulation is more and more used in the design process in a wide area of applications. Rising demands and the complexity of modern products also increases the need for models and tools capable to cover…
Mechanomy develops physical systems models in Modelica , with Julia increasingly providing the pre- and post-simulation calculation and analysis (in place of Matlab or Python). We do the simple math and basic checks in Julia's fast and responsive environment in order to justify and focus model development in Modelica. Coming into the 2021 Modelica conference, then, I was particularly interested to…
It was a joy to (safely) attend the Fabtech and Motion Power Technology shows after too many months of COVID. Attendance was a little depressed from two years ago, but I think the manifest supply-chain challenges of the recent past contribute to a feeling of urgency among manufacturers. The big booths seemed bigger, with a greater variety of machines and capabilities on display that perhaps…
One of the very interesting things about our response to covid19 has been to watch who responded, who felt both the need and the capability to help. Now, I don’t want to discount the admirable efforts of the formal healthcare system and its many practitioners, but I want to focus here on people that changed what they were doing and attempted to expand the capability of our society to respond to…
Two liter soda bottles are made of clear plastic to show off the product. They're pretty robust, surviving shipping while internally pressurized to ~30psi with very few scratches, and are readily available in convenience and grocery stores. Given reports of ongoing shortages of face-shields for personal protection, I realized that a clear 2L bottle could be adapted into a face shield in ~10…
One of the core motivations for our work at Mechanomy is the belief that many of today's systems are too complex. While complexity is inherent in every system, a significant portion is incidental to the core problem, added to the system by inefficient business, development, and production processes. And it is this incidental complexity that the ongoing COVID2019 pandemic is particularly revealing:…
At Mechanomy, we are building tools for the future of product design; as a researcher, designer, developer, manufacturer, seller, user, or supporter, this is your future. Technology does not improve by itself; tomorrow is only better if we work to make it so, and this work is efficient when we can separate real frustrations and limitations from hearsay and imaginings. As we've approached…
I appreciated Oleg Shilovitsky's vignettes on the future of system development and use ; at Mechanomy we are also trying to enable this future of mass personalization and programmatic manufacturing. In turn, I'd like to tell you the story of Frank. Frank has a problem. As he was leaving the worksite last Friday he noticed an old, battered satellite core. Frank's predecessors had long since…
Continuing our tour , let's take a quick dive through the steps required to solve a Modelica model and simulate the system it describes. First is the model text, the Modelica code you write to describe elements of your system and their interaction. Avoiding ambiguity requires strict adherence to the Modelica language specification , which in turn is developed by the Modelica Association to be able…
Mechanomy. Mecha nomy . Mechanics + -nomy , the system of rules, laws, or knowledge. In the name Mechanomy, we are interested in the system of rules, laws, or knowledge of mechanical systems. This is the same construction as taxomomy , astronomy , etc. and is pronounced similarly: meh-kan-o-mie. A good name communicates the core of an entity; and at the center of our activities and interests is…
This is the first of a recurring series touring the capabilities and features of Modelica , a systems modeling language that we have great hopes for. Where to begin? At its core, Modelica is a programming language that allows users to write down equations that describe the behavior of some system. In this usage, system refers to some group of things that interact according to identifiable rules. A…
We're just getting rolling, but are already looking forward to sharing our ideas and work in the new year. If you want to be kept up-to-date, say hi .