Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built
github.com
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!
I think in general, there are too few people putting in the deep time that prepares them to be an engineer in their near future. You're practically there already: it will feel the same after perhaps you decide to call yourself a degreed "engineer" but you will have more mental tools, broader knowledge, confidence from having been able to make what you envision, understanding across disciplines. You have a lot to look forward to! As I told my kids: don't let imposter syndrome take hold of you for a moment! You are a rarity in any group.
From the channel description. I love it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Welcome to the club
So there’s kind of a guild in many places.
Although they prefer „chambers“ as a name these days.
Project looks cool
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.
I've been vibe coding a large project the last couple of days and while it is pure magic, I have little understanding of the actual code (yet!) and the output is probably worse than if a team of Software Engineers spent a few months on it, but I still get to have sane discussions with Mr. Claude Sonnet about software design patterns and code coverage. And like I said: days, not months. My "role" in this project has of course shifted from "developer" to "overseer" or "architect" even, but if I hadn't have a Software Engineering background my LLM would have produced a rather poor result.
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.
On the other hand, I'd also say there's one type of satisfaction you get from learning a new language, instrument or paradigm, toying around to see if you can write something difficult that proves to yourself that you understand it, and there's a different satisfaction from using your knowledge to make something truly large and impressive in scale and scope. And the large/impressive stuff does require a lot of boring boilerplate or rehashing things you already know how to do, with little creative flourishes along the way. But historically this would be when I would really discover the flaws and corner cases, too. And polish the end product.
So, like, you build some demo engine you think is amazing. Now you want to share it with people, so you have to write a bunch of UI. As you go along you get new ideas to add to the engine and you spot performance flaws or logical flaws, because the work of polishing it is meticulous, and you're actually using what you made the way someone new would use it for the first time. Seeing it through their eyes. This is where most of my projects would always fizzle before AI. But AI short circuits everything you'd get from this process because, for one thing, it feels like cheating. And for another, it disengages you. That core change to the kernel you realize you want to make, suddenly you let AI make the change and there's one less thing you actually own or understand perfectly in your code. It's no longer your hand crafted ninja blade. And yet the temptation to let it happen is very strong... so strong that I actually find it paralyzing. I neither want to write the UI myself nor let AI help me. I get depressed and stop caring.
I'm a musician, too. And I paint. What you get when you play music or paint is 100% yours, comprised of your knowledge and skill and whatever spirit happens to be inside you at that moment. Code was that way for me. It was art, part technical and part inspiration. But it's been robbed of some essence, the satisfaction of not only solving something but also materializing some piece of yourself out of sand for the whole world to enjoy. Some piece of thought that was completely yours. Nothing coded with AI completely belongs to its prompter. And honestly, losing that sense of craftsmanship is devastating to me and I think it's a huge loss for humanity.
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").
(Ps: yes, I'd rather have two passionate, eager interns under my wings than one burnt-out senior by my side.)
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.
In a serious note, looks good and don't let the paperwork keep you down!