Product and Mechanical Engineering Blog | Adept Engineering

Regarding Your New Year’s 3D Printer Purchase Decision…

January 22, 2015 by Adept Engineering 4 Comments

Happy New Year! Please allow me to take this moment to thank you, our readers. We’ve enjoyed your comments and look forward to our exchange in 2015! In today’s post, we will be discussing 3D Printers.

Last year flew by in a flash, while this year commemorates Adept’s 20^th anniversary. It seem like just yesterday when we opened our doors to new and exciting projects. A lot has certainly changed in the past 30 years, notably, advances in computer technology coupled with its’ user friendliness has been nothing short of remarkable. Technology once reserved for the elite has quickly becoming mainstream. In 1985, most engineers were surfing the net through 14.4 modems, Creo was known as Pro Engineer and Solidworks was,… nonexistent. So many technologies have advanced, but one technology that has truly coming-of-age is Additive Manufacturing. It may also be familiar to you by its process name, Stereolithography or SLA. Although, Additive Manufacturing is accomplished through a vast number of processes today, not only SLA. Some of the processes are so dialed in they’re capable to fabricating jet engine assemblies.

The Monkey Wrench: A Lesson in Developing Specifications

November 12, 2014 by Adept Engineering 1 Comment

If you’ve been actively following this blog, you’ve read about the importance of developing a sound idea. The development of an idea begins in the form of a compilation of requirements, expectations and overall purpose of your product or device. An engineer works through this compilation to prepare a methodical approach focused on realizing a design’s creation.

The engineer’s first step is to prepare a specification, i.e. a series of requirements which ultimately become the backbone, or in some cases, the achilles heal of the design. All specification entries in part and as a whole must pass a sanity check.

This post tells the tale of the monkey wrench, a lesson in developing specification requirements.
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You have a wild idea. Will it actually work?

September 24, 2014 by Adept Engineering 1 Comment

As an engineer, I’ve been involved with my share of wild ideas, visions and desires. I’ve listened to and entertained, against my better judgment, some many of a wild idea. Some ideas I regret not to have taken more seriously, several I was retained to prove or disprove their validity, and many that developed into some really exciting devices. Along the way it became evident that there were some basic and necessary guidelines, a few of the key ones were: don’t be too quick to judge, focus on the details and always keep the goals in sight.

Making Wise Prototype Decisions, Don’t Drink from a Fire Hose

July 10, 2014 by Adept Engineering 1 Comment

In my previous post, I mentioned the responsibility of deciding when to transform a virtual prototype into a physical prototype. I may have been a bit premature having this discussion with my readers. As you may be aware, there is a great deal of hype – surrounding “desktop printing” and I may have jumped on that bandwagon a bit hastily. This technology has been around for decades. True, some very industrious individuals brought this technology main stream by offering desktop printers within a price point of a personal computer. However, before you get to play with this new toy, you must have a “solid model”. While there are many tools to create solid models, engineering or designing a solid model is a very different undertaking.

Tools That Transform Concepts into a Physical Prototype

June 12, 2014 by Adept Engineering 7 Comments

“With great power comes great responsibility.” I’ve always expected a bit more from this quote. If Peter Parker is who claims it, so be it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Spiderman movies. What’s not to like about a good guy winning and getting the girl. Unfortunately, in the world of engineering, we are not always fortunate to have the same fate. We are given great power and responsibility, but without the girl (or guy, let’s stay on theme…Spiderman and all). The power to engineer and develop in the virtual world is fantastic and has granted us unimaginable vision and responsibility.

Robots are among us…

May 5, 2014 by Adept Engineering 1 Comment

With June fast approaching and another school year coming to a close, students everywhere are looking forward to the summer break. This also brings another year of the USFIRST Robotics championships to a close. For those of you who are not familiar with USFIRST.org, let me introduce you to one of the smartest after-school programs ever conceived. FIRST (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”), is an organization that encourages Engineering to elementary, middle school and high school students through an exciting yearly robotics challenge. The shortest and best description of the program was given by one of its founders, Dean Kamen, who brought us the Segway, and coined the phrase, “The sport for the mind”.

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