Hardware Podcasts

S6E20 John Martell | Mechanisms, Drones, and Excel Macros

Being an Engineer · 16 May 2025 · 43m · Episode 20

What this episode covers

John Martell, Director of Data Management at Aero Velocity and former Lead Mechanical Engineer at Pipeline Design & Engineering, discusses his transition from designing mechanisms for medical devices and aerospace to managing geospatial drone data. He details his specific process for mechanism design, emphasizing the use of pen-and-paper sketching, reference sites like 507movements.com, and movable sketches in SolidWorks to validate motion before finalizing CAD models. Martell also shares insights on overcoming imposter syndrome in leadership, the importance of company culture in preventing engineering team failure, and how he accelerated productivity by building Excel macros and Python scripts to automate mundane tasks like drawing exports.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Pipeline Design & Engineering, Aero Velocity, Workhorse Aero
Tools
SolidWorks, QGIS, LP360
Also
507movements.com

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