Articles

Sherpa Design's High School Externship Pilot

Admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:13:31 GMT

Designing for Low Power

Battery life in an embedded product is rarely decided by the datasheet parameters. It is decided much earlier, by architecture choices that compound silently through the entire program — and are painful to unwind once the schematic is frozen. This article collects what has proven out across several low-power data-logger and wearable programs, with a bias toward the decisions that matter most and the ones that most often go wrong.

Sherpa Design's High School Externship Pilot

Admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:02:46 GMT

Externship Program 2025

This year, Sherpa Design piloted an externship program designed to provide a select group of high school students with hands-on experience in an authentic engineering environment.

Additive manufacturing UL 94 V-0 parts for semiconductor clean rooms

Sherpa Design — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:13:16 GMT

An innovator in the semiconductor industry was looking to create hose and cable management parts using additive manufacturing technology. The parts needed to be rigid, flame retardant, and easily cleaned. These stringent requirements were paramount to prevent fire hazards and contamination within clean room environments, as rigorous decontamination procedures are costly and disruptive.

FEA Boundary Conditions

Admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT

FEA Boundary Conditions: A Practical Guide for Mechanical Engineers

Regardless of which finite element analysis (FEA) package you use, boundary conditions are among the most important modeling fundamentals to get right—and one of the most common sources of error. It’s tempting to quickly apply fixed constraints, run the model, and enjoy those beautiful stress contours. But, if you need your results to be more than pretty colors, you must think carefully about boundary conditions.

Your NX Performance Problem Isn't NX

Admin — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Are you frustrated by slow toolpath visualization, odd shading glitches, or choppy simulation playback when working with CAD/CAM software? You might suspect NX, your graphics driver, a recent Windows update, or even your company's IT setup. But the real culprit could be something far less obvious: a crucial hardware architecture decision made before your laptop ever left the factory — one most engineers never even hear about.

Carbon 3D Printing for Electrical Engineering Support

Admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Electrical Engineering

Carbon 3D printing has become one of the most useful tools for supporting electrical engineering projects at Sherpa Design. Instead of waiting days or weeks for parts, we can quickly turn around components for instant validation and feedback.

Integrated Design Approaches for Robust Optical Sensor Packages

Admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Optical sensor packages face a fundamental challenge: they must maintain precise optical alignment while surviving the mechanical stresses of real-world use. A fraction of a millimeter shift can destroy image quality, yet these delicate assemblies must withstand drops, vibration, temperature cycling, and years of use. This article explores the engineering approaches that ensure an optical sensor housings remain both optically precise and mechanically robust.

Shedding Light on Consistency: Sensor Calibration and Testing Explored

Admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMT

We use various optical tools, including spectrometers and filters, to measure and characterize devices, ensuring accurate spectral energy readings and color balancing.

Product development sprint

Admin — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

Your engineers are busy focusing on the high value projects that have been greenlit for the year. That leaves you with little time and resources for those exploration projects. The ones based on ideas that could turn into next year’s high value projects. So what do you do?

Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering working together

Admin — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT

ME and ID working together in harmony

Yin-yang is a Chinese philosophical concept that describes opposite but interconnected forces. This pretty much sums up the relationship between industrial design and mechanical engineering. Industrial design (ID) is the yin, concerned with how things look and how people experience a product; industrial designers lie on the spectrum somewhere between artist and engineer, and individual designers operate anywhere along that spectrum. Meanwhile, mechanical engineering (ME) is the yang, dealing with the technical and functional aspects of making a manufacturable product. In a balance of form versus function, there’s going to be some headbutting; however, both are needed to create innovative and well-designed products.