Atrick Designs simplified, elegant, and innovative products with great user experiences. We have the multidisciplinary skills and experience to think, design, and build across disciplines and manufacturing techniques. Work with us for a better way forward with your product.
Core Services:
Research, Product Development, and Innovation
What is involved to complete your idea and bring it to production? Atrick's agile product development methods start with a complete understanding of your idea, help you simplify it, then work to deliver designs above your expectations. Below are the different disciplines involved in bringing a product to life.
CAD Design
CAD does the math and geometry heavy lifting to accurately model and design in 3D. The image shown is a transaxle design for a client. This involved working from original drawings and 3D scanned raw castings. Atrick made configurations for both a complete original version along with an upgraded version to work with some newer options.
3D Scanning / Reverse Engineering
3D scanning makes a digital copy of an existing part or space. We have a 3D scanner with .006" resolution in house. From the .stl, .ply, .obj or point cloud created from the 3D scan, the scanned info (purple and green in the upper image & purple in the lower image) is imported into CAD to use as a design reference or to make a part files (grey in both images.)
The lower image shows machined features in blue along with touch point references in green for expected casting surface references for machining.
3D Printing / Rapid Prototyping
Proving out a design can be costly and time consuming. 3D printing has substantially reduced the time and cost associated with verifying designs. Atrick Design is capable of 12.9" X 7.25" X 15.7" SLA 3D printing at .002" resolution in house. The part can also be printed in pieces and assembled after printing like the lower image that is 21" tall. These parts were printed in translucent resin to give machinists an easy view of a few features cut into the walls of the parts.
Metal parts, casting patterns, and lost wax type parts can be 3D printed to quickly get parts in hand.
3D metal printed parts can be sourced if the cost associated makes sense for your design.
Modular Mechanical, Electrical, Electromechanical Design, and Light Coding
Modular design is building sensible sized pieces of a product so they are easy to build, assemble, are configurable, and are easy to service or replace.
Some developers are hamstrung by their islands of competence. Making a change in a component can have ripple effects through different components and different disciplines. We have the ability to easily work and design across disciplines helps simplify and improve the overall design of your product and avoid problem areas. Our experience designing, fabricating, building, assembling, troubleshooting, training, and refining the design to move into production is where we excel.
We work with multiple PCB manufacturers to get PCBA (pc board assemblies) quick turned and at affordable prices. We also have relationships with manufacturers when its time to scale up for production.
Product Evolution
Prototyping a design is a great early step to prove out the concept. These are typically quite time consuming, fragile, and have a substantial bill of materials. Sometimes an assembly isn't quite production ready but is rushed through extending the pain of quick fixes over many products and support calls and costs. Din Rail components can look like quality to some, but they are usually very expensive, labor intensive, and error prone.
Evolving a part, module, or product to a more sensible production method will remove assembly time, BOM costs, variability, failures, and service calls.
Industrial Design
Industrial Design is an early step in what the product looks like and how it is used. Unfortunately many designers do not consider safety testing requirements, manufacturability, and user experience in early renderings. This can trap the design on an unfortunate course and deliver unrealistic expectations.
Safety Testing
UL, ETL, IEC 60601, Safety Labeling, Build Book, and clean BOM's are all parts of safety testing and manufacturing. Atrick Design will design for safety testing and will guide your product through safety testing from discovery through approval.
There are a lot of uncommon terms used in product development. We do our best to use easy to understand terminology but occasionally will use the common acronym, initialism, or term. We have a page of terms to help you make sense of this.
Why choose Atrick Design?
We deliver long term value with simplified, turn-key, world class designs. We have the practical hands on experience, understanding, and tools to navigate risk, simplify, and deliver designs and turn key solutions above your expectations. You won't be bogged down with flashy acronyms, false badges of achievement, empty promises, surprise costs, or blindsided by trouble areas. We're raising the bar on design, communication, and quality. Work with us to experience a better way forward. See our blog for some of the projects we have done.