About — Hilmybox Journal
I build the engineering tools I wish I'd had as a student. And as a professor.
I'm Irfan Hilmy — a mechanical engineering academic, three decades in, currently teaching at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Fujairah. Most of that career has been spent in the gap between what engineering software can do and what it actually feels like to use. Hilmybox is my attempt to close it.
The site is a slowly growing library of browser-native tools — real finite-element solvers, vibration labs, 3D visualisers, equation editors — built around a stubborn belief: engineering software shouldn't look like it was made in 1998, and learning it shouldn't feel like a hazing ritual.
The credentials, briefly
Because they explain the obsessions.
Every tool on the site is, in some way, a grown-up version of something I used to wish I could hand my students.
What's here
Real solvers, not toys.
A browser-based FEM beam calculator. A 2D truss analyser built on the direct stiffness method. A single-degree-of-freedom vibration laboratory rooted in the research I started at the ITB Dynamics Lab in 1996.
3D, for engineers.
URDF robotic viewers, CNC visualisers, additive-manufacturing experiments — extending the joining, forming and manufacturing themes that run through my research.
Authoring tools.
A LaTeX equation editor for turning math into print-ready assets. An in-browser Jupyter Lab.
Things built for the joy of it.
A 3D Tetris. A chromatic maze. A LEGO atelier. A glass-and-light village builder. Sudoku on a cube. Some tools earn their keep just by being delightful.
The build
Hilmybox is also an experiment in solo-built engineering software. The first production version shipped in two months, with AI coding agents handling much of the implementation while thirty years of teaching shaped what to build and why.
It's an ongoing piece of pedagogical research — an attempt to fold three decades of classroom insight into something that scales beyond a single lecture hall.