林偉明

Relling Systems

Design Engineer
2026
Relling deploys intelligent workcells for American manufacturers, especially shops that cannot afford a classical integrator. As founding design engineer I took the whole cell, brand through hardware through the room it all runs in, because a 0-to-1 robotics company does not wait for a specialist in each lane.
Timeline
May 2026 to present
Tools
Figma, Shapr3D, Three.js, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Attio, PostHog, HTML/CSS
Scope
Brand, growth, hardware, software, operations, strategy
The Relling wordmark over a robotics factory floor: cobots welding, machining and picking down a working line

Turnkey workcells for American manufacturers

Five things a shop would otherwise buy from five vendors, integrated and qualified at HQ, and delivered as one unit that arrives running.

Relling.mov
00:00 --:--

01Four stations of the job

A Relling cell ships as one unit: arm, sensing, tooling, software, safety, qualified at HQ. The job was the same shape, four stations around one cobot, owned end to end.

  1. 01 NorthBrandLogo, system, jacket
  2. 02 EastHardwareCell and tooling
  3. 03 SouthTeleopInterface and data
  4. 04 WestStrategyCompany direction
01

Brand and growth

Relling rebuilds American manufacturing expertise by making advanced automation practical for small and mid-sized shops. Everything in this chapter exists to say that in a way a plant manager believes: the marks, the site, the funnel that carries a lead, and the films that demystify the machine.

02From screen to skin

Marks, tokens, type, and the jacket, one system that holds on a product page, a brochure, a film, and a body on the floor.

Back of the navy Relling company jacket, screen-printed American Automation / Runs on Relling, worn on a beach at dusk
July 12, 2026 San Francisco 📍

03The live website

I designed and built rellingsystems.com from scratch. One job: take machine vision, teleoperation and turnkey cells, and hand them to a shop owner who does not have a robotics team on staff.

The reader

A plant manager, not an ML engineer

Every page opens on the job to be done and earns its technical detail later. 19 capability pages and 11 industry pages exist so a search for a real shop-floor problem lands on a page about that problem, not on a home page.

/government
For Government

Made in America. Built for America’s industrial base.

The texture

One dither, drawn in the browser

The flag above is not an image. An 8×8 Bayer matrix picks one of five glyph states per cell and a travelling sine moves the cloth; every dense cell is the Relling mark from its own vector paths. Point the same engine at a photograph and you get a plate. Drag the handle to see the input.

/government · plates
Heavy fabrication on the government page: molten metal pouring in a foundry
The product

A cell you look at, not a spec table

The workcell page leads with the machine itself, running. It boots before the page images do, because on that page the hardware is the headline. What you are watching is the real page, recorded.

/workcell
The last thing on every page

Two arms, one handoff, forever

One arm picks off the conveyor and hands to the other mid-air; the second packs the box for the pallet. Inverse kinematics against the real joint limits rather than a baked animation, which means the handoff has to actually rendezvous.

rellingsystems.com · footer
The joke

An arm applies for a job

On the careers page it hunt-and-pecks its own application into a 1984 Macintosh, hesitates over submit, and gets a bomb dialog. Then it starts again. Same engine, same rigged arm as the two scenes above.

/about/careers
What it costs

04Ads, site, PostHog, Attio

Meta, Google, and Microsoft plus the live site feed PostHog. Attio takes that, and conversion data goes back to the advertisers, a self-healing loop, not a sink.

06The collateral a buyer forwards

A cell gets bought by a room, not a person. The brochures, renders and leave-behinds exist so the one champion inside a plant can carry the argument to everyone who has to say yes.

02

Hardware and workcells

Digital trust has to be backed by physical execution. This chapter is the part you can put your hands on: cells assembled and qualified before they ship, and the tooling modelled and printed to make a specific part move.

07Assembling turnkey workcells

I designed, built, and assembled turnkey cells across a variety of robot vendors, cobots, KUKA, FANUC, and other arms, for multi-million-dollar deployments. Not one SKU. Not a render.

The unit

A cell ships as one thing

Arm, sensing, tooling, software and safety, qualified at HQ before any of it lands on a customer’s floor. The page on the right is the public version of the same object; the rest of this station is what it takes to make one.

/workcell
The Workcell page on rellingsystems.com: a cobot picking from a bin, with the cell described as one unit
From tinkering to a rack that ships

A cell is a machine before it is a robot

Years of taking things apart and building them back is what made this end of the work possible. A cell has to boot, see, think, and stay inside a customer’s walls. I built that part too.

08CAD, fabrication, materials

What the parts actually are belongs to the customer, so the drawing below stands in for them. The path is the part I can show: modeled in CAD, fabricated, materials-tested, and then bolted onto cells that run on real deployment floors, on cobots, KUKA and FANUC.

Illustrative plate: CAD, fabrication, and materials testing, not a scan of a job CAD FAB TEST ILLUSTRATIVE · CUSTOM HARDWARE · NOT A SCAN
03

Teleoperation and tooling

Training a vision-language-action model needs clean data and an interface an operator can actually feel through. This chapter is the software side of the arm: the controls an operator works through, built to capture the contact-rich data the models learn from.

09Teleop rigs, from servos to policy data

I owned this end to end: the leader arms an operator actually holds, the stands they sit on, the software that drives them, and the recordings that come out the other side. The hardware and the software were built together, because an arm that feels wrong in the hand is usually a software problem, and the other way round.

A dual leader-arm stand: two mirrored servo arms on one crossbar, each ending in a handle the operator holds. DUAL LEADER STAND SERVO
04

Operations and direction

A startup is not only its product. This chapter is the bird’s-eye view: keeping the funnel, the floor and the team pointed at one bet.

10Company direction

GTM, hardware, and culture pointed at the same bet, or the other eleven stops are a list of side projects.

A note from David
David Lam
David LamDesign Engineer, Relling Systems · San Francisco

I own the pipeline from the printed tool on the wrist to the teleop that trains the model to the site and ads that bring the buyer in. Building a robotics company from zero needed a generalist, so I became one: brand, growth, hardware across vendors, software, the room, and the hire.

David
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