Glossary of terms

In the glossary below I’ve explained a number of terms that frequently come up in discussions on design and development of products, especially for medical devices. You can scroll down the page, or use the A-to-Z list below to immediate jump to an alphabetic location down this page.

[0..9] . A . B . C . D . E . F . G . H . I . J . K . L . M . N . O . P . Q . R . S . T . U . V . W . X . Y . Z

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3D PDF

That the popular Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) supports the interactive viewing of 3D content is not very well known. It is possible to embed a 3D viewport in a regular PDF document, and when using Adobe Reader to view this PDF it is possible to interact with the 3D object: The viewer can pan, zoom and rotate, and can select which parts of an assembly to show and which to hide. Distributing 3D designs as PDF gives gives viewers without 3D CAD software the ability to review and comment on the geometry.

3D printing

The term “3D printing” refers to a number of Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes where polymer or metal parts are built up one layer at a time. More narrowly it is used for one of those processes: Fused Filament Modelling (also known by its Stratasys-branded name of Fused Deposition Modelling or FDM) where an extruded filament of molten polymer is deposited layer by layer. The vast majority of consumer-level 3D printers—including my Wanhao Replicator X—use this process.

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Assembly

This is the entry for 3D-printing

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ISO 13485

ISO 13485 …

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mbed

ARM mbed is an ecosystem for prototyping embedded systems that use different ARM 32-bit processors (mainly Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M3, my personal favourite is the NXP LPC1768 module). It is very interesting for prototyping as mbed-enabled modules can be programmed by saving an executable (binary) program file—created using the browser-based mbed compiler—to the USB flash drive the module presents itself as when plugged into a host PC. This makes updating or restoring firmware versions in the field very simple: my clients are able to perform drag-and-drop updates on the prototypes and demonstrators I built for them.