Coralville, Iowa · Manufacturing engineer

Mark Reimer

I take hardware from first build to volume production by day, and build machines in my own shop at night.

Now

Standing up a circuit board production line at Collins Aerospace

Sr Principal Project Engineer · SMT · reflow · robotic contact solder · underfill · AOI · X-ray · ICT · depanel · conformal coat

Process engineering owner for a new circuit board set line: ramped from 25 to 75 sets per day in four months, with 130 as the next target. Before this I spent five years taking a MEMS wafer process from lab to mass production, scaling output 3x inside the existing footprint and leading the control systems for 55 pieces of custom process equipment.

Machines

Accel Solutions: custom automation equipment, built on my own time

accelsol.com · mechanical design · panel build · PLC and HMI programming · robot integration

Through Accel Solutions LLC I design and build custom automation equipment for regional manufacturers: fixtures, test stands, and assembly cells. I do the whole job myself, from CAD through panel wiring, PLC code, and commissioning on the customer's floor. Most builds run on Allen-Bradley or AutomationDirect PLCs with Fanuc robots where the work calls for them.

Build videos and shop progress are on TikTok at @mark.builds.machines.

Build write-ups are in progress. Individual machine pages with photos, specs, and what went wrong along the way will land here.

Open source

Cellwright and the OCM standard

cellwright.ai · github.com/burnt-toast76/OCM · open standard + MCP service

OCM is an open standard for describing automation cells and the industrial components inside them: drives, HMIs, sensors, valves. Cellwright is the software that implements it, and it is product-agnostic by design, in contrast to the vendor-locked AI platforms coming from the big PLC houses.

The part I'm building now is a claims service: manufacturer datasheets and manuals are transcribed into validated, cited claims (value, document hash, page, locator) and served read-only over MCP at mcp.cellwright.ai, so an AI agent asking for a sensor's response time gets the manufacturer's number with provenance, never a guess. Ranges are served verbatim; picking an end of a range is the engineer's call, kept visible.

Shop-floor software

Tools I built for problems I kept running into on the floor.

HelpFab

helpfab.com

Manufacturing operations software centered on issue and downtime tracking, so a line's problems are logged where they happen and visible to the people who can fix them.

StokTrack

stoktrack.com

Visual parts inventory for workshops and labs, organized cabinet → shelf → bin, with live quantity updates and QR bin labels.

Framelled

framelled.com

Browser-based configurator for aluminum extrusion frames: lay out the frame in 3D, get the cut list and BOM.

Patents

Nine granted and one pending, across semiconductor process equipment, seals, appliances, and agricultural machinery.

  • US 2025/0237959Plasma multi-wafer ashing system · Rockwell Collins pending2024
  • US 9,638,327Radial shaft seal, single-piece elastomer · Engineered Seal Products2017
  • US 9,140,365Outer seal for pivot joints · Engineered Seal Products2015
  • US 9,133,937Heavy-duty shaft seal · Engineered Seal Products2015
  • US 8,657,296Radial shaft seal, self-forming labyrinth · Engineered Seal Products2014
  • US 8,033,377Folding unloading auger engagement assistors · Deere & Company2011
  • US 7,698,901Icemaker assembly for a refrigerator · Maytag2010
  • US 7,516,531Universal trim piece system for a refrigerator · Whirlpool2009
  • EP 1425950Grain tank cleanout plug · Deere & Company2006
  • US 6,691,861Auger discharge chute with dribble door · Deere & Company2004