Mechanomy

When thinking about design and manufacturing systems, I've found feedback loops to be clarifying.

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".

See this post on Substack Today, January 16th, is Mechanomy's fifth birthday.

CAD modeling involves many repeated commands, but in Solidworks these four operations were so annoying that we wrote some simple macros to automate them.

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.

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 liv…

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.

How quickly can customers evaluate product suitability?

I attended the 2023 Automate show this past Monday and again enjoyed seeing much of the automation industry condensed into one hall.

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.

With Christmas coming this Monthly Mechanism looks at a former gift to anticipate the challenge of shopping for and giving tools.

In this #monthlyMechanism we write a simple Julia package to model compressive springs.

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.

When I first began Mechanomy I spent some time building composer.mechanomy.com, a web-based environment for simulating Modelica models.

What tools do engineers have to explore new ideas?

Gears are foundational to many mechanisms, and it is the involute curve that is responsible for many of their capabilities.

Two months ago I described the differential belt transmission in general terms; this month revisits it in our Moover linear stage project.

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.

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 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.

Continuing our MonthlyMechanism series, let's look at the differential winch.

While bookmarks are reliable, we'd love it if you would follow Mechanomy on Twitter, LinkedIn, or via RSS feed.

What happens if you put a screw inside a screw?

Engineers don't often talk about why they do what they do.

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

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).

It was a joy to (safely) attend the Fabtech and Motion Power Technology shows after too many months of COVID.

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.

Two liter soda bottles are made of clear plastic to show off the product.

One of the core motivations for our work at Mechanomy is the belief that many of today's systems are too complex.

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.

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.

Continuing our tour, let's take a quick dive through the steps required to solve a Modelica model and simulate the system it describes.

Mechanomy.

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.

We're just getting rolling, but are already looking forward to sharing our ideas and work in the new year.