(github.com)
- any project that involves hardware or physical objects (especially ones you are manufacturing!) is impressive
- the craftsmanship
- references to established standards
- documentation
- actually publishing
As others have said here you can drop the “wannabe” tag (or don’t, we’re all wannabes at heart :))
Nice job and keep up the good work!
Now, it remains to be seen if this project will land you a professional level paid job doing what you seem to love to do, so I think the whole "engineer" question is still up in the air.
Yes, anyone can call themselves an engineer but I believe, in the West at least, that until you graduate from an accredited University or have 3-4 solid professional industry experience, calling yourself an engineer might be considered premature.
Adult engineers are already pretty bad at knowing with other people know and what's worth saying. This is the one area where students are markedly worse; "if I know it, everyone else must." Or just figuring out the important bit to explain.
The reel holds fast its position naturally when the cable is at any length, and allows a heavy truck tire to be lifted manually using the light-duty hand crank.
Notice in the Github animation that the visible rotor has nine lobes and the stator has 10 stations, this can be confirmed if you take a screenshot.
Start doing it for money, and you're officially a professional software engineer.
Make software that genuinely improves peoples lives (like the Linux kernel currently running the computer I'm typing these words on), and you can call yourself a good software engineer ^_^
But I too have met engineers with music and also medical backgrounds. But that's all more than half a century ago, it seems that employers expect much more narrowly focussed qualifications these days.
Just like writing favorite instead of favourite, while I'm here, I think the right thing to do is respect the customs of the country which welcomed me. It would be very ignorant of me to pretend I'm more of an engineer than my American colleagues with CS degrees.
Afaik claiming to have an MD (for obvious reasons) or a PhD would land you in hot water much, much faster, despite technically being exactly the same "offense"
I think it's fine.
That doesn’t mean that certain professional engineering disciplines exist that are regulated in the US. Systems Engineer, Computer Enginner, etc are not in that realm.
In the US, engineering is regulated only where public safety is directly at stake. Most engineers work for companies that assume liability for their work.
I'm an over-40 year old wannabe engineer too, except I didn't get as far as you on my little pet project: designing a 'universal' gear, based on professor Jack Phillips' work "General Spatial Involute Gearing." So far I can model the basic helicoids in Siemens NX, such that they touch along the ISA (Intermediate Screw Axis) which passes through the CDL (Center Distance Line) in between the gear axes. I have no clue how to proceed from there with actual involute teeth.
My idea is to at some point write an NX Open script/module, which takes in various parameters (like selecting the shaft/axes vectors; inputs ratio, pitch, etc.) and spits out something structured like my model.
If only it were free for minors to play with as a toy, beats Minecraft as a builder!
Let's just say things changed since then.
There is also a difference between intuitive and familiar.
I learned to CAD on Fusion 360 with no formal education and it just worked. I can use FreeCAD sufficiently well to be productive (it really has become better over the years). I tried OnShape and just started working. I like using OpenSCAD and CadQuery...
... but I still struggle to get spline extrusions to work in NX because you just have to know which buttons to press in which order.
He's V8motoreer under the hood, a guy from the hood.
From the channel description. I love it!
PS: anyone who can keep their focus on a project for more than a few weeks and complete it can become a fine engineer so don't worry about that.
You’ll meet a ton of interesting, friendly teens who are all helping each other build awesome projects.
Cool project!
(Hack Club is a nonprofit and I’m the founder of it)
It’s really important to me that Hack Club is a space that helps teens become the people they want to become vs. pressuring them down any one path.
zach@hackclub.com
Ages ago there was a Flash file, PartKam (also forked to MakerCAM) which used SVG as its native format.
You did something meaningful, you even waited to share it with the world until version three, and you learned a ton doing it. Well done, dude!
If you have the motivation to chase your passion to build these machines, you are already an engineer. Keep going!
And never let anyone tell you otherwise.
Welcome to the club
Although they prefer „chambers“ as a name these days.
So there’s kind of a guild in many places.
Project looks cool
(Ps: yes, I'd rather have two passionate, eager interns under my wings than one burnt-out senior by my side.)
The projects I built as teenager spending weeks, it's just would take half hour of vibecoding now.
It's like getting all the cheat codes and then the game isn't fun anymore.
We can learn assembly even though compilers exist. We can learn OpenGL even though 3D engines exist. We can learn to write a relational database even though SQLite/MariaDB/Postgres exist. Et cetera.
You can also play games for which you have all the cheat codes and simply choose to not use them.
No, and I don't even know how you can even read this from my post.
To me, this is implying that software engineering in 2026 is less impressive than 10 years ago because "you can just vibe code this without effort". Having used AI a fair bit for both business and pleasure I can assure you that you can't always "just vibe code" something useful. Discrediting software engineering because a power tool was popularized in the field is... eh. I don't agree with that.
It sounded like you thought that with AI anyone, even children, can solve literally any problem with ease and therefore it's not very impressive (...and "perhaps we don't need 20+ software engineers building that app if 5 can do it with AI").
In a serious note, looks good and don't let the paperwork keep you down!
two things worth measuring if you have not: backlash, and how much it changes after a few hundred cycles. cycloidal drives are usually sold on low backlash, so knowing your real number turns this from a nice print into something you can quote a spec for. if you have a way to load the output shaft, efficiency under load is the other number people will ask about.