Hero Utilities

Designing complex mechanical components like gears, splines, and cams is a well-known pain point in engineering CAD workflows. The math is well-established, but translating equations into precise geometry within a CAD environment typically requires either expensive software plugins or tedious manual iteration. Hero Utilities was born from repeatedly running into this friction during my time as CAD Lead on the Jaybots robotics team — I needed gears fast, and existing solutions were either overkill or unavailable.

The core of Hero Utilities is a parametric generator: you input the key specifications (module, number of teeth, pressure angle, face width), and the tool outputs a fully-formed CAD body ready to be imported into your assembly. Under the hood, this involves computing involute tooth profiles using standard gear geometry equations and expressing them as precise curves in the CAD kernel. Getting the math right — and making it robust across edge cases like small tooth counts or unusual pressure angles — took more iterations than the user-facing simplicity suggests.

Hero Utilities is fully open source and designed to be extended. Adding a new component type follows a consistent pattern: define the parameter schema, implement the geometry generator, add the UI form. I've kept the codebase modular specifically so that contributors can add new utilities (spline generators, belt drive calculators, etc.) without needing to understand the full codebase. Contributions and feature requests are welcome on GitHub.