When designing components that will be made of plastic, it’s often necessary to add ribs and gussets to improve the stiffness and strength of load bearing features. This reduces material volume and print time for 3D printed parts, compared to the time it would take to make these features out of solid structures. That’s because print […]

In a world of ever-increasing electronics, our lives are continuously impacted by devices that incorporate some sort of heat-generating circuitry. When it comes to electronics that dissipate power in the form of heat during normal operation, it is often necessary to manage this heat, to ensure the components don’t exceed their maximum allowable temperatures. One […]

Light plays an important role in the design of many hardware products. Often, they are both decorative and functional. Indicator lights are the most minimal user interface: They tell you whether the device is turned on, low on battery, or “thinking” really hard. On modern electronics, the light’s source is almost always an LED. However, […]

Fillets are one of those mysterious design features for which there seem to be no clearly defined rules. Either a part is entirely devoid of fillets, and most or all edges are well-defined, or the part’s designer decided to take the opposite route, and every single edge and corner is rounded with some size of […]

‍In my last article, we discussed methods of improving part stiffness through geometric changes and why that is an important tool. Here in Part 2 of the “Designing for Stiffness” series, we’ll be looking at changing part stiffness through material properties. We’ll use many of the same formulas, but we’ll focus on the properties we […]

There’s a reason kids love Lego. When I was a kid, nothing was more valuable to me than my big blue bucket of the multi-colored bricks. Even when my parents encouraged my interest in engineering with more complex Fischer Technics, nothing replaced the joy of quickly snapping pieces together in increasingly complex shapes. Wouldn’t it […]