There are a lot of free trade magazines available for engineers and designers.  These can be fun to read, and have lots of great pictures to flip through when you’re bored at work.  How often do you actually find yourself referencing one of these free magazines, however, when you have a truly complex technical problem that needs solving?  Probably never.  You search google and you may search some engineering forums, but odds are what you’re looking for is tucked away in an expensive, subscription only, unsearchable academic journal.  So how do you find this information?  Enter DeepDyve. Read the rest of this entry »

During my first few months as an engineer out of college I designed an assembly that would allow me to tighten a knurled nut, increase friction between multiple surfaces, and ultimately regulate the torque applied between a motor and a shaft.  I spent weeks iterating this design and probably a few thousand dollars in machining time before I realized I could buy what I needed for a few hundred dollars from dozens of companies within 50 miles of my plant.

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Robotbox is a site to share and collaborate on do-it-yourself robotics projects. I know there are a lot of engineers out there who have half completed projects sitting in a box in the basement or garage.

Check out the top rated projects already in the system.

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These holes full of rubble would sure slow me down on the expressway, even if they are a little bit aggressive as a speed deterent.  If you hit one of these at more than a a few miles per hour, you would risk breaking an axle, or at least blowing out a few tires.

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OpenThesis.org is a free-to-use, centralized database of academic theses where anyone can upload their completed and approved thesis.  Their system typically includes details like bibliographical information, author, school, title, abstract, and date of publication, but doesn’t always have the full text available. Read the rest of this entry »

I took a trip to Houston recently for a friend’s wedding.  While there, he gave me a pretty extensive tour of NASA’s facilities.  We saw three things that really surprised me. Read the rest of this entry »

Industrial Interface was mentioned recently in a great article in Manufacturing Business Technology magazine titled “Product Innovation: Keeping good ideas on the fast track.”

“Companies like IndustrialInterface.com take the collaborative approach a step further, offering online platforms that provide product engineers with a whole new universe of potential resources and partners.” ~Manufacturing Business Technologies Magazine

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