Long before Mokimo there was a spiral notebook, filled with machines drawn up in Tom's childhood but never built. The drawings were wrong in every proportion, but the habit was there: decide what the thing must do, draw how it will do it, then go and build it.
A steam-powered tea machine, sketched crudely in pen: steam pressure pushes hot water through the pipe into the cup, the cup's growing weight releases a ratchet, a weight drops and swings an arm to add the tea and sugar, a pump tops up the milk. The physics was optimistic and nothing in it would have worked - but every page asked the same question: how would I make this work? That question never went away.
School workshops and a bench at home: PCBs etched by hand, stripboard and Arduinos, a 3D printer that mostly printed parts for the next machine. Slowly, the tools were accumulated to turn those early ideas into reality.
Mechanical Engineering at Loughborough, picking up electronics and firmware along the way - because real problems don't respect discipline boundaries.
Three years designing scientific instruments, medical devices, and precision consumer products: places where a drawing error becomes an expensive lesson.
Drawings that other people have to build from. Test plans written before the hardware exists. Requirements treated as promises someone will check. And the assembled system always reveals what the CAD didn't show - so test the assembly, not just the parts.
Mokimo was founded to keep the early habit intact at professional scale. Small, so decisions stay close to the hardware, and close to you. We build what we design and test what we build, carrying work through design, build, integration and test. The projects got harder. The notebook logic didn't change.
Every project starts as a drawing that has to justify itself before anything is cut. Cheap on paper, expensive in metal.
We work through design, build, integration and test. The gap between paper and product is where projects fail; that's why work with both.
A design isn't finished when it looks right. It's finished when it has been measured, exercised, and proven against what it promised.
If you have something that needs to exist: a product, a piece of equipment or a production step that needs to work, we'd like to hear about it.