Feel free to use the timeline to skip boring parts! The technical section starts at 11:35 , I didn't cut out as much as usual this time.

You say you're not an engineer. But the best engineers I know love this channel, admire your methodology and diligence, and describe you as an engineer whether you like it or not. Certified? Maybe not. But qualified? Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Side note: you're softly spoken, so having the microphone closer would be nice. Currently it's a bit quiet and the ads when on mobile are twice as loud.

writing my bachelor thesis in Bremen Germany at the moment after struggling with university for six years. I can really empathize with having many side projects and the reasons you dropped out. I was on the edge of doing so myself several times. The combination of bad teaching and hard exams is like you said really frustrating. The worst part for me was that there were many courses were the lecturer couldn't bring across why some theoretical principle is worth learning or what real world application there is. So I often had the feeling only learning for the exam and not to solve future engineering problems. I think our society puts to much value in your degree and not in what your capable of. Love your videos and have the feeling that you know what your talking about. Keep up the great work!

I'm in my 11th Bachelor Semester in Darmstadt. I feel what you said about the education system there. I wanted to become an mechanical and electrical Engineer since I was 9 Years old and I lost all the fun and love for it in the past Years. I just want do get my degree and I really don't know what to do after that. I will have to somehow find my passion for the subject again after graduation.

You can use the "parametric text" add-in for Fusion 360 to automatically write version numbers into your parts. However, you will still need to place it manually once per part.

I very much enjoyed the insights about engineering and design principles. Didn't find any parts of the video boring, resonated with most of them. Definitely quickly becoming one of my favourite channels when it comes to engineering inspiration, alongside StuffMadeHere.

5 million views.. Its easy You are humble and your content is of the very highest quality! You are one of the very few channels I will stop other things to watch on release! comment and liked 21 seconds in .

Mechatronics engineer here, watching your videos for from the begining and commenting for the first time now, to say that I would love to hear more about your conspts / philosophy about design process. Really interesting and stimulating.

@Christopher thank you for being this open and for sharing your story with us. If my opinion matters any, you are more of an engineer than many engineers around. ...says a Dipl.-Ing. of electrical engineering with +25-year job experience. I just love the elegance, focus and beauty of your solutions.

If you enjoyed satisfactory, you will almost certainly enjoy factorio, its spiritual predecessor. It has more emphasis on large automated factories and logistical challenges than the exploration based gameplay of Satisfactory, and includes train based logistics and circuit logic.

Your experiences and ideas have made this channel one of my favorites. I don't agree with everything, but people who have their own philosophy and can verbalize it are valuable. I have created a lecture in college using a 3D printer exactly like the one you took and I can see why you would say it was a disaster, but I think it is a matter of the amount of knowledge they have, not due to the 3D printer. There are a lot of constraints to consider when designing and machine tooling things, and students don't really think about that. The lecture I created was a "success" because it allowed the students to learn about such disasters first hand. By the way, when I use a 3D printer, my thinking never stops, it just accelerates. The feeling of wanting to touch the design with my own hands accelerates all my motivations. Thanks for creating this video.

Interesting. Especially the design philosophy. Most other makers on KZfaq have a diametric approach where they try to iterate fast. I never liked that myself. It's refreshing to see somebody else sharing a wholistic design process. I like to do thought experiments and design in my head. As soon as I sit down and try to CAD something, everything slows down. In my mind, I can go over 10 iterations in an hour, move things easily and imagine how things might interact. Having easy to use simulators would be great to also get precision in, especially in fields like PCB design where it is much harder to imagine things rather than mechanical design, still, currently the mind seems to be the best ... or like others prefer, rapid iterations.

Ein seltsames aber sehr ehrliches Video Danke!! Bin grad in einer ähnlichen Situation und schon gespannt auf deine nächsten Ideen!

As a former Apprentice in industrial Mechatronics and Student of Mechatronical Systems Engineering with lots and lots of years in the service of building, installing and fixing PCB handling machinery at customers facilities, I tell you, that every manufacturer of customer specific machinery would win industry with you employed. You are the golden star of creating quality industrial solutions

I found this to be your most interesting episode yet. I differ quite a bit from you, finding my mechanical engineering studies at TU Dresden somewhat easy and interesting, but can only admire your work. I think you‘re on a great path, most likely better than most regular students like me. I lack motivation in doing projects like yours, mainly because I‘m really into some sports but also because I have‘nt found any niche that I think I may be successful with. Having said that, I really enjoy you talking about engineering philosophy, it teaches me much more than what I can learn from your actual projects (wich are also so interesting!) I would love to be able to sit down and chat with you some day, but for now just keep making these awesome videos please. Cheers

It amazes me how you think through so many theoretical design and engineering principles, while not enjoying university. Because I mostly enjoyed the theoretical education in universities and will now even stay in academia, but I never had those deep fundamental thoughts about engineering principles. 🤯

i get so excited when i see you've uploaded haha, i really love your videos and am super happy you're here. Thanks for making these projects into content for us

Sprichst mir so aus der Seele! Keep on the good work!

This was exceptional and inspiring, thank you for it. I love the last part in which you talk about the philosophy of designing. I think it's underrated how much the way we think about work impacts the actual quality of work. Principles, constraints, work philosophy and outcome-oriented mindset can have a tremendous impact in the quality of a product. I look forward to see how your way of thinking about creating a product and running a company evolves over time!

"Un ingeniero es una persona que hace que las cosas funcionen bien, o las mejora", a mi me parece que USTED cumple con las cosas que construye, con ser un excelente ingeniero, mejor que muchos que tienen el titulo de una universidad.

Thank you for answering my question! (The little arm and the bolt heads, the design makes sense now)

Your previous content has been very good. I’m not sure I’ve seen someone have so many subscribers with so few videos which is an anomaly and speaks to the quality of what you have been designing along with how well you presented it.

"Die Summe der Komplexitäten bleibt gleich" sagte mal ein Dozent zu mir (quasi der Erfinder von LED und Matrixscheinwerfern für KFZ). Gutes ruhiges erklärendes Video, vor allem die eher philisophischen Teile. Gerne in Zukunft mehr zu den Prinzipien und Abläufen, davon gibt es viel zu wenig qualitativ hochwertiges hier wie dieses Video!

I resonate and agree with so much of what is said here! I have a mechanical engineering degree from the US but I think a lot of the "top tier" universities here are similar to how you describe the school you dropped out of - many lectures are taught by teaching assistants since the professors are only worried about keeping their research paper output in order to get tenure, or enjoying the fact its nearly impossible to fire tenured professors. I run a company selling hobby combat robotics parts and kits, I am pretty sure I'll be making use of the MPS someday when I have larger order volumes and more space. The one robot kit I sell currently has 132 individual parts, about half of which are fasteners of a bunch of types and sizes. It is such a massive pain to make these but profit margin is just barely worth it. I would love having an affordable and reliable way to automate things. I even bought a screw counting machine since one fastener I have 36 of in the kit, and it broke within the first 6 months of extremely occasional use...

Very good communication and a fantastic and honest insight into the mind of a great engineer. You'll continue to do great things.

this project is sick!

Your approach is inspiration for many mechanics enthusiasts. Keep up the great work!

This resonates on many levels. Not just because I spent a good few years at TUD and don't have a degree to show for it. You have much more well formed thoughts on "the system" than I had at that point. I've only arrived at some of the conclusions much later. My mental model and ways of learning were fundamentally incompatible with this. Managed to come out of things OK eventually and am now happy with life, but it was a much longer and convoluted journey. All the best for your journey!

Greetings: I have done machine design and automation for years. When I first started, I quickly came to realize that the "Sky" is the limit... for how much you can spend on any project. As a result, I have made it my quest to discover and figure out how to build simple solutions. Sure a man can come in with a million dollars and make something that might work? I have come to say... where is the man who can figure out how to do it simply and for min. amount of expense. That is why I enjoy channels like yours. I see you doing the same. Make it simple: Not Expensive! As a result, I have been able to do much work, for companies; and save them a lot of money. They love me! Great work. I like your courage!!

As someone with a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and currently pursuing my PhD, I honestly envy your work more than anything. As much as I loved getting my degree and I did learn a lot, I realize now that I learned so much "school smarts" and very little about actually implementing projects. Even worse is that compared to many of my friends, I had many more practical skills and a well developed background in internships and projects. Yet almost a year after graduating, I can say with 100% firmness that I have learned much much more not being in school. In school, you're so focused on learning the curriculum regardless of your actual interests after school. I am so insanely frustrated that I won a hackathon all the way back in 2019 for implementing a machine learning algorithm and I loved it, but I never developed any skills beyond that point until a couple months ago. I absolutely love AI/ML and I'm even doing my PhD in it. I can't help but think I would be so much farther along if school incentivized projects and specialties and building a portfolio just like an artist. I really feel only after getting my engineering degree am I actually learning to be an engineer.

i'm doing a mechatronics study and you are a big motivation to keep going ❤

Thank you Christopher. Very thoughtful Q&A mixing some philosophy, some thoughts about being an engineer, a fair critic of the German education system's flaws as well. I used to work with German teams in electronics and computers' motherboards' networks architecture, across the French-German border and I'm still amazed by their rigor, their seriousness and their skills. German Doktor Ingenieur is a world-class degree indeed. This post is also instructive about MPS. I agree with most of your approach of prototyping. This post is as interesting as we've been expected it for a long time. You answered to most of our questions, thank you.

Wow. I am really impressed! Can't wait, that you start teaching young engineers your way of thinking!

I really have to say, you come across as humble and absolutely intelligent. The designtheory/-philosophy sequence was very interesting and I envy the way you think. I'm eager to follow your journey and wish you the best of success! Grüße aus NRW

I'm also studying at the TuD mechanical engineering. The problem with lectures is that a lot of them are just theoretical deriving the formulas you need to understand on how to use them in the exam. So often these are completely irrelevant for the exams. This means you need to rely on the quality of the exercises they give you. Unfortunately often the quality of the solving approach aren't well documented and they skip a few steps so it's hard to follow or in the worst case just give you the final answer, so you have no idea what you did wrong. In the exams they intentionally give you too little time so you not only have to solve complex problems, but do so under the pressure of time, which leads to small errors. These small errors however are punished harshly so you might lose most of the points. They don't give you points for what you did right. Instead they subtract points for everything you did wrong. This is why mostly you just need 37% to pass the test. This way they ensure just 30-40% fail the exams. If they set the bar to 50% up to 80% of people fail (happened last semester with E-tech). The only way to get some real world experience is doing side projects in your free time, but this takes away time from studying. There are a few courses (about 3) which are practical, but those normally take a lot of time and don't have that many CPs. Most of the stuff is so theoretical that you have no idear how to actually use it. But for some reason I still enjoy it (5 semester). I think they don't actually teach you to be an engineer, but think like one. Most people have bad grades in bachelor and have good grades in their masters, where you actually do something you are interested in and it is closer to real problems.

Hier ist nichts langweilig oder zu viel (erst recht nicht du!). Jeder geht seinen Weg und auch wenns nicht immer einfach ist. Du bist leidenschaftlich dabei und ich finde das sehr schön.

You know, its kind of strange how much I felt that video. Especially the first ten minutes. Im about ten months away from starting my second degree and luck would have it, its engineering. I have hopes that this will accelerate my knowledge in that field. But I have and had my doubts about that plan. I do feel like that what Im about to face is an info dump and nothing less. I do dream about starting something just like you and eventually get there I hope. I would love to see more of your perspective on "was bringt mir so ein Studium eigentlich und wars das eigentlich wert" in a longer video. Especially as Im going to start studying not far away from darmstadt myself, Mannheim to be exact, which is much likely going to lean on what Darmstadt is doing.

I love how honest this video is

Very professional, informative, enjoyable and inspiring video! Thank you so much for answering all those questions and giving so many insights.

I also totally agree about the aspect of not getting stuck into itterative prototyping. Last year, I designed wat has become my biggest and most daring project (I risked my admission into engineering schools on an idea principle found in a failed experiment), despite having better ideas, better versions in the head, going as long as you could go with the first prototype is mandatory in my opinion. You will see all the defects, and circumvent them instead of re-building from scratch which is hugely time expensive. When you will have gone as far as you could, you will have a clear list of the defects to correct, and make a way more functional second prototype. (And yes, I am currently working on the V2.0)

I would love to hear more about your design philosophy, especially that constrain thing made me thinking

One of the best answering video ever, very nice thoughts about things not only yes or no answers.

As someone who doesn't have an engineering degree, works on similarly niche projects, and overall is heading in a similar direction I relate to your thought process. It is very useful to listen to you talk about the development process and see the progression of a difficult project like this one. Videos like this give me new incites on how I should approach my own work.

I love seeing youre passion about engineering and how you think about everything and how to get the best results with all the things you explained. Thats why i love youre channel you always inspire me

I'm finishing engineering studies and feel so unattached to the university and I understand your thoughts, at the same time I have a really interesting and engaging project for my thesis that made me think of engineering not as a study field but much more as a set of skills in life to get things done despite academic focus

03:09 LOL, I thought to myself, doesn't that guy look like the Architecture/Civil Engineering KZfaqr? What a coincidence :)

What I noticed during my studies (technical computer science) at a university here in Germany is exactly that. Poor, outdated education that is only useful if you want to become a professor yourself and teach this outdated stuff to the next generation of students. And this is what happens. The professors never worked one day in the real world out there. They study, get a doctor and a professor, and then teach the next generation to do the same. I am thankful that we have a second path in Germany regarding professional education. Today, 10 years later, I know that when I can hire a "Fachinformatiker" (school & on-the-job-trained IT specialist) or someone who studied computer science, I always prefer the first one.

Thanks for the background info. Your normal vids are inspirational, but this one is too.

Engineer here - I find your content very interesting and this video was a great insight into your thought process. An engineering degree is just a piece of paper - you certainly possess an engineering mindset which you can't always develop at an institution. I look forward to following along with your projects. Love the old drawing table BTW. It would be great to see a drawing table vs CAD drawing challenge!

Super Video, ich bin gerade zufällig auf deinen Kanal gestoßen und habe mich davor kurz durch das Video mit dem X1C-Roboteraufsatz gezappt. Erst dachte ich: 34 Minuten? Das schaue ich mir nicht ganz an. Jetzt bin ich bei Minute 26, habe die Wiedergabegeschwindigkeit vor 10 Minuten von 1,5x wieder auf 1x gestellt und hänge an deinen Lippen. Sehr gutes Video und sehr weise Perspektiven. Glückwunsch, dass die Resonanz entsprechend ist! 60k Subs in ca. einem Jahr sind sehr beachtlich.

What a great story! Keep up the awesome work!

I graduated with an associate degrees in mechanical engineering about 2 years ago, and I loved every minute of the education, even the classes I failed. It is really tough finding someone who wants to pay me to fully explore every random avenue of my curiosity no matter what the commercial application may or may not be. So I'm stuck designing cranes and EWPs (which I actually love, but I wish I could do lots of other stuff too). Only part finished your video at the moment but I've run out of time this morning. I'll be back to watch the rest when I get a minute.

As an Energy Systems engineer i really like your approach and general thinking. I would love to here more about it.

My humor is probably broken but the "scene" at 28:28 is pure comedy. So dry, so german, so stupidly flat, and still incredibly funny.

As you said, many people probably drop out because they should drop out but if the university terminally frustrates someone like you, it feels like there is something wrong in the system. I wish you a lot of success as an inventor and founder. We need people with your combination of rationality and creativity. BTW, I'm skeptical about your claim about SpaceX. I think it is too early to tell how successful and economical their approach is compared to the great things NASA, for example, has achieved and is still achieving. Right now SpaceX is burning a lot of investor money.

Thank you very much for sharing all this. I found it really interesting.

Your university and German dropout rates section reminds me of a recent slamt3D interview with the founder of Thangs. He described how unjust the filtering system of German universities was.

Wow, this video was amazing. I would love more, especially the topics you didn't have time to dive deep for in this video!

I liked this. I am a special effects technician, and feel very similarly about thinking constraints and the approach to my work - which is often begun with an assessment of design parameters in view of things like time/available budget/crew competence/safety etc etc. I like to find what I hope will be ‘elegant’ solutions. All design is compromise - you call it trade off. But there is a formulation that will optimise the outcome. That is elegant design. Not necessarily in terms of aesthetic….which is often nice, but usually way more important to others than to me. I mean elegance as optimal and reliable function. I often think about the fact that we talk about selling ‘effects’ but really we are selling reliability in the face of uncertainty. So - very good to get a taste of your thinking in this video and feel resonance. Love to hear more when you get around to that

Thank you for this Q&A. 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

A lot of wise words, you will not have to worry about your future. I can see similarities with myself and I’m a bit older so my 5 cents would be that you keep doing what you believe in. Smart yet humble, great qualities. Wish you all the best in life! I will of course continue to follow your journey.

Thanks for making this video. I too dropped out and I completely agree - it's not cool to drop out. There's a lot of stigma. To me it worked out better than I could have imagined and ultimately I'm really happy that I did so.

I feel you a lot with your experience in engineering school. I finished mine (USA) but the professors truly did not care to teach and were only concerned with their research grants.

Great introduction and I hope that you can keep going on! I think that is perfect important to stress the point of motivation. As mechanical engineer myself I had also trouble to understand why some of universities are motivation killers and not builders. I passed my mechanical engineering degree learning a lot of facts that I didn't understand where and how to apply and drained my energy very often, especially at Zagreb, that has also origin in Germanic university culture by learning a lots of theoretical fact and never questioning them. That was much different when I moved to Denmark but still with some issues to find connection between practial use of all theoretic facts. However, with the practical work in field of plastic manufacturing (working today as senior tooling engineer) some dots started to connect. Therefore I hope that at some point somebody will start to understand a need to make some changes in our educational system.

Never feel bad about leaving University. I feel like school is for preparing young smart humans for disciplined lives. You seem to have your poop well and truly in a group. Carry on Sir

Danke für diesen spannenden Einblick. An sehr vielen Stellen sprechen Sie mir einfach aus der Seele. Ich wünschte nur, man wäre sich mal in einer Vorlesung begegnet

Wow, i've been wondering what you've been packaging for ages! Thanks for this

Another excellent video!

What a great video and sad university did work out for you. I'm about to finish my electo-mechanical degree at Penn State, but that is just the degree. I am helping to build a large 3D printer company right now and I have designed all of the machines we currently sell. And the amount of parts that are modular that swap between each machine is very intuitive and also effective for our builders. I always love watching your videos on the MPS, as it gives me ideas of ways to innovate and look at problems differently.

Hey! Two things: - Small business here doing assembly and packaging in Europe. Definitely following with interest! Box folding one day...? About moving from FDM to IM, my opinion as a small business: FDM under 100 (or for specific geometries), then MJF (Weerg in Italy is great) from 100 parts (prices are great from 200), then injection moulding over 5000 (mostly for profit margin or if you need specific surfaces that MJF can't give you).

I really enjoy your videos, thank you!

Yes, that is pretty much how it is with many degrees. I studied physics and the professors didnt at all understand what they were teaching and every sheet and every exam had grave errors in it. 90% of text books were wrong. You had to teach yourself all of it yourself. Why visit a university then? There were students that were good at exams and students that were actually competent, very little overlap.

Loved hearing your background on engineering design and your approach to it! As an engineer whose class had very little instruction (or practical experience) on the design process, you have a lot of valuable insight into the design process that I'd love to see more widespread than it is. Perhaps you would be interested in making a video, blog post, or book about it? As always, loved the video

Loved the entire video! 👌Thanks for sharing.😊 Other than cost, laws of physics, efficiency can be the most overlooked. Aesthetics, ergonomics can be important as well. Just some 💭❤️👍

Good one, hope more of design phylosophy is coming, you have interestung ideas. Also documenting, showing the project do helps to think on stuff)

Thank you for the look behind the veil. 👍😎👍

Thanks for the tips you inspired me to make better designs 👌

I'm designing my own 3d printer and only printed a few test parts purely because i don't have the frame yet, but most of the cad is done now and that's what i love about cad. i'll see where everything goes and will hopefully fit

This is so informative thx :) Please do another video on your philisophies as you mentionend. Would love to hear your thoughts on that.

pro , you figured out its about filtration , treat it as such , get how the exam maker thinks , old exams , and try link with people that took that course before, its kinda the unspoken truth of uni , any ways you have good mind and work for the right motives , i think you deserve to get your self that degree -even if its boring grind . really like your channel and your way of thinking.

As an engineer, let me tell you: you ARE an engineer, whether or not you have a piece of paper from a university. Keep up the good work, and keep learning and innovating!

I studied mechanical engineering in Germany and I can 100% confirm the problems in universities you are adressing. It was a really frustrating time

I‘m sure you’re more of an engineer than most who finish!

Cool video! I actually have a similar background with treehouses and such. I would say my way of thinking when it comes to designing and my sense of what constitutes good design align with what you have said in the video. Perhaps starting as a kid with something like a treehouse, where you have lots of consttrains and are limitations that require thinking outside the box and coming up with unique ideas, makes up for this way of thinking.

I'm sorry that you feel let down by your education system. I meet people like you all the time. I believe that many people like yourself would have been better served by undertaking an apprenticeship. I myself went down that route many years ago. You can always do a degree afterward. I did this, and still feel the apprenticeship was far more useful to my engineering career than anything I learnt during my five years at university where I graduated in a MEng(hons) and a MSc. Remember that being an engineer is not to do with what paper you hold but it's a way of thinking and behaving. You my friend are an Engineer.

Very enjoyable video

In the interest of constructive feedback: On the topic of open hardware personally Opulo comes to mind. They also sell a b2b product with a possible hobbyist application i.e. the lumen pnp. I think it's a bit disingenuous to say "It doesn't work in hardware" and would be more honest to just say "I fear it would make me less money that i can take to work on the project the way I see fit."

Nice video my Freind Am looking forward for ur next videos

Great content, thank you for sharing more about yourself and your ideas! I understand where you are coming from re: open hardware from a business perspective. What's your take on the software side of things? thank you

I always wait for your videos. I am your silent subrsciber. Please keep them coming. thank you

You're very cool, keep up the good work!

Ach ja, die TUD. Ihr habt eine nette Maschinenbau-Fachschaft (und einen ganz hübschen Campus). Ich bin schockiert, dass du mit mir angefangen hast zu studieren. Ich bin noch dabei, noch dieses und nächstes Semester. Bei mir dauerts so lang weil ich die Uni verbessern wollte, statt sie zu verlassen. Grüße von der Uni Stuttgart

Bro... thank you! I thought I was the only person alive thinking that trade-offs is an inferior way of engineering. It felt so lonely. I just stayed quiet about it and did my thing.

This is refreshing.

about open source: make the interfaces (module dimensions, plug location and types, software protocols, ...) public and open source (meaning everybody can amend it, so there is no BoschMPS that is incompatible with yours)

My name is Piter, I live in Brazil and I found your project very important, I'm a student and I'm trying to improve a system like yours, you sell your project for counting screws, nuts and washers

This guy businesses, I like how you work.

bachelor in germany is more than 5 years?! In Quebec Canada it's 4.5 years including 5 internship. Keep making great content and best of luck!

Super video. Falls das MPS auch für kleine Schrauben (M2-M6) angewendet werden kann, könnten wir als Testfirma behilflich sein. Wir müssen Schrauben in Baugruppen montieren, und eine Abzählanlage wäre da sehr nützlich. Wir haben den Sitz in der Schweiz. Falls du also noch Tester brauchst oder du schon Endprodukte anbietest melde dich gerne bei mir. Beste Grüsse

Nice content, but I absolutely hate that the questions were silent in an otherwise listenable video.