Later Maturity

The state of the art...

From my current perspective, it seems that Pro/E has been left in the dust. I have not had a request to use that software in several years. That does make me a little sad. I like Pro/E and wish I had the opportunity to use it. Even today I still yearn for the tools Pro/E had (has?) for resolving rebuild failures. I celebrated those tools in my presentation at the 2007 PTC/User World Event at Tampa in 2007. My licenses are perpetual, so, theoretically, I could install Creo 3.0 and use it. But, I haven't and probably won't. I made the transition to Solidworks over 2012 and am perfectly satisfied. The transition was not painless, costing some loss in my productivity, but I did capitalize on that by presenting my experience and offering tips at the PTC/User World Event at Boston in 2014.

Below are some of the more contemporary projects I have worked on, all of which on this page utilized Solidworks.

Radius Product Development

The two images below are of a wearable fitness monitor made by BodyMedia. This product went to market and had some success. The main challenges here were packaging the components (PCB, button, charging contacts, sensor pads, battery, light pipe, etc) into an IPX7, 2-shot, insert molded housing.
The images to the left and below are three different medical device projects. The left shows a syringe flange extension that allow arthritic patients to more easily self-administer injections. The line art below is an injection device that has safety lockout and tamper evident features, also for arthritis treatment. The exploded view below is a portable and dockable patient monitor.
These bottom two images show a halter heart monitor that gathers data for 7 days and reports via Bluetooth. The challenges were mostly around IPX7 housings with rigid flex circuits overmolded with elastomer. The bottom most image is the fixture I designed for installing software and firmware and testing, both pre and post overmold.

Kaon

This interactive trade show kiosk is designed to look like a server rack with the front panel made of two touch screen monitors. The sheet metal rack that supports the monitors breaks down to fit into a manageable shipping crate. I designed the rack to break down without the need for tools using captive thumb screws and magnets.

Furniture By Dovetail

This high quality furniture manufacturer landed some jobs that incorporated sheet metal components and some mechanical actuators. The conference room table below had 22 seats, each with its own interface access panel with A/V and communications ports. To the right is a height adjustable lectern with articulating touch screen, keyboard drawer, and A/V and communications panel.

Farm Design

The cart to the right has an articulating support arm for positioning an ultrasound transducer array. The image below shows some of the development for a dosimetry device that can measure a patient's exposure to radiation through the enamel of their teeth.
The image to the right is a device that introduces a set of concentric catheters into a patient. The outer lumen is pressurized liquid and the inner lumen is retractable and transmits laser energy.

Velico

This project was to scale up a process for freeze drying blood plasma. As a proven method for stabilizing human blood plasma for long periods of time, the freeze drying process in a sterile environment was essential. Minimizing the disposables and protecting the durables in the machine for cost effectiveness was a main goal.

Shark Ninja

I worked on a short project here developing a test platform for the vacuum cleaner group. The modular device allowed for easily swapping out various subsystems and components to evaluate new concepts for cleaning efficacy and other performance criteria.

Jabil

The internal design group at Jabil hired me to work through some challenges with the drive system of an endoscope. I conceived of a novel method for solving the problem of excessive slack in the drive wires. This project involved a substantial amount of breadboard and prototype building, debugging and testing.

Ximedica

From a disposable insulin pump user interface design and subsystem integration (right) to a single piece moisture resistant latching closure (below), my work here spans a wide variety of product types, manufacturing processes, and use cases. All of the projects shown here were completed using Solidworks.
The image to the right shows various concepts for easily identifying tubes to prevent errors in administering various IV tubes in a stressful or low visibility, emergency situation. Below is a prototype concept for a safety locking cap to be installed on an aerosol spray can.
The two images below show work I did for the artificial womb project. This device is a system to extend the care available to pre-mature infants by up to 4 weeks. The top photo is of the canopy that was installed on one of the three engineering verification units that were built. The canopy had many challenging performance requirements and features such as internal camera, lighting, thermal & sound insulation, gas spring assisted opening, dual latch actuators, etc.   The bottom image is of the collapsible, articulating arm that holds and deploys the onboard portable ultrasound system. Deployment was assisted with gas springs. The arm would present the ultrasound at a fixed height but allowed user access from either side of the canopy.
Below is an injection device that delivers a solid, time-released drug pellet. The pellet is extremely delicate and needed to be inserted at a specific velocity to minimize the chance of damage to the drug pellet, while minimizing patient discomfort. The exploded view shows the device close to the manufactured clinical trial version. The image below that is a breadboard to develop the insertion speed control, actuation,  and escapement mechanisms.
The image below shows cross section views of a variable dose, single use, auto injector with lock-out and tamper evident features. The images show the device in its concept phase. The injector accepted a prefilled syringe and turning the dose knob would determine the amount of drug that would be dispensed. Managing the large tolerances of the glass syringe and the highly variable location of the stopper were the biggest challenges to this project.



The image to the left shows a needling device - very much like a tattoo needle. The water-proof aluminum housing holds the rechargeable battery, the motor, the transmission, control board, and needle depth adjustment mechanism. This fit into an ergonomically designed plastic housing that accepted a disposable needle cartridge.

Web Engineering

On this project, I worked with Web to solve their problem of designing a floating refueling station at a marina to mitigate the flexible fuel line length differences between the tidal extremes. For this problem, I modeled a simplified breadboard of the dock and constructed a simplified scale model to observe the behavior of the hose.
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