informal

📺We love seeing our clients appear in the media! ⚡It made our day when we saw J.B.SMOOVE riding a #CLIP e-bike earlier this month on the Late Show with Seth Meyers. 👏Congrats to Som Ray and team for the big win!

#Detailsineverydayobjects Details are everywhere around us (Probably, that's why they get ignored?) You can essentially pick any object around you, look carefully, and it will tell you a story of design, engineering and manufacturing. During my last Costco trip, I spent a few minutes looking at this lego box. Here's what I observed, some questions that I could answer and some that I could not. #mechanicaldesign #industrialdesign #designeducation #mechanicaldesignengineer #mechanicalengineering #solidworks

🛠️ We love a good hardware teardown, which is why we're sharing this one of the Titan Electric Jigsaw. It's a beautiful example of #DFM, and includes great callouts and areas for improvement. 💡 Sometimes the best way to understand good design, and the complexity that goes into product design and manufacturing, is by taking things apart and reassembling them!

✔ Pro tip: Don't forget to add test points to your PCBA! 📌They're useful for hardware debugging, programming, and validation ❔ Can you spot the test points on this PCBA? 

📌 Pro tip: Design with Ingress Protection (IP) ratings in mind! 📌 You cannot easily make something waterproof later. 📌 Luckily, the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has developed IP ratings, which grade the resistance of an enclosure against the intrusion of dust or liquids. The ratings are widely used throughout industry. ✔Save this chart 👇 for future use!

♦ There are so many variables that go into deciding which manufacturing method is best for your product. ♦ The material, geometry, ideal cost, and speed, for instance, can determine if a particular method will work or not. ⚡ With this in mind, we created the informal #MFG database to help! Plug in your variables and see which method is best for you :) https://www.mfgdb.com/

📌 Pro tip: Design with your final manufacturing method in mind, instead of designing for rapid prototyping methods. ✔️ You can #3Dprint nearly any shape, but that doesn't mean you can manufacture it! ✔️ Manufacturing methods like injection molding have many design rules, but scale for mass production easily. ✔️ Design with manufacturing from day one to save a ton of redesign time later. You don't need to fully design for manufacturing yet, but keep these design rules in mind as you go. ✔️ If you’re stuck on which manufacturing method to choose, or need guidance, reach out to Sam Holland or Nate Padgett and see what our team of experienced freelancers recommends!

📌Pro tip, buy a #3Dprinter for in-house low fidelity testing! Some of our favorite brands include Bambu Lab, Prusa Research, and Creality 3D. 📌Outsource to prototype vendors when you need high fidelity or anything aside from FDM. 📌Many vendors exist for quick turnaround 3D printing, CNC machining, and sheet-metal forming. You can choose fast, good, or cheap! 📌In general, steer clear from the first page of a Google search for vendors. You're paying for their SEO results more than their quality! 📌We recommend Makelab or Craftcloud for all things 3D printing and companies like SuNPe PROTOTYPE in China for all methods of prototyping. 

📌Pro Tip for early startups, don't design like Apple! They have a team of hundreds of engineers and designers and can afford to do things a typical startup cannot. Here are a few of our favorite tidbits: 👉🏻Please don't microdrill holes or machine titanium on your first generation product. 👉🏾Add draft to your plastic parts when possible. 0 degree draft = complicated tooling. 👉🏼Glossy white plastic parts have a higher scrap rate - they show scratches and imperfections. 👉🏿optimizing for every millimeter of internal real estate requires very tight team collaboration and lots of time to perfect a design. 👉🏽Fancy unboxing experiences are expensive! packaging can cost between $5-10 for something that is thrown away. 👉🏻CNC machined aluminum looks great, but is only scalable for thousands of units if you have the money to afford thousands of CNC machines.

♦️Pro tip: never design in a vacuum! ♦️Bring in engineers early during the ID concept phase to ensure your designs can be manufactured! ♦️Keep the #industrialdesigner on through all phases of work to ensure the final product remains as beautiful as it is functional. ♦️Want more advice about bringing your product to market? Talk to Sam Holland or Nate Padgett - they are ready to help!