If you design products, whether you’re a full time in-house engineer, a professional freelance industrial designer, or a moonlighting inventor, you’ve likely come across situations in which there is no solution to the design problem you have come across. I’m not referring to a scenario in which you cannot come up with a solution; I’m […]

In the first part of our Roomba teardown, we looked at the components that allow Roomba to move around and suck up dirt. Now we’re going to see what allows Roomba to actually navigate around your room semi-intelligently. The first sensor is actually a mechanical component—the small caster wheel found on the bottom of the […]

“Perfection is achieved not when there Is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery Your day isn’t going well when your boss quotes French novelists. In this case, my design was rejected under the accusation that it wasn’t “elegant”. What the heck was that supposed […]

Threaded connections, such as bolts and nuts, are used in a wide variety of applications, ranging from plastic toys to massive bridges. The one similarity that ties them together is that these connections need to stay together when we want them to, but also come apart when needed. For example, the valve covers on an […]

For accurate manufacturing cost forecasting Join us for an exclusive webinar with Scott N. Miller, founder and CEO of Dragon Innovation, and Fictiv’s Sylvia Wu, where you’ll get practical advice on how to structure your Bill of Materials in a way that enables early insight into your complete manufacturing costs. During the webinar Scott and […]

Springs are absolutely everywhere, from jewelry clasps to large industrial robots. The probability of a fresh-out-of-school mechanical engineer encountering his or her first spring design problem within the first year of graduating is not 100%, but it’s pretty high. Most of the time, it’s not practical to go straight into making a custom spring in […]