Flexural hinges are used more and more in microsystem technology. Recently, the néel institute’s technical services (SeraS) were requested to manufacture and to simulate the behaviour of a compact positioning device to be dedicated to an x-ray beamline at the european Synchrotron research facility (eSrf), Grenoble. The purpose of this assembly is to position a sample in the x-ray beam with an isotropic precision of a few microns. it is mounted on a robotic manipulator, which is part of a bench for transfer of crystal samples to the goniometric head of an x-ray diffractometer. The main technical challenge of the system lies in a hardened steel part of complex shape. Full text