ETOILES is a small spacecraft lab at Cal Poly aiming to create open-source technologies. As an extracurricular, I just joined the structures team for PowerSat, one of the lab's ongoing projects.

I spent this summer working as an engineering intern at Mob Armor, a mobile device mounting company. Over the summer I worked on a range of projects with various focuses. In the beginning, I proved out my skills in SOLIDWORKS by implementing design and production updates to our line of iPad Enclosures. This was my first time working with ERP software and implementing design changes on a production level. Another project I did was create the initial design of our 2021 SEMA show booth. I gathered input from past event attendees and company partners to redesign our booth from the prior year. This had me thinking a lot about one-off fabrication and how to direct a complex assembly process. Concurrently to both these projects, I was spending time testing consumer electronics devices to verify their safety features and evaluate their quality. I was responsible for both developing testing methods and carrying out all the needed tests. I ended up finding a few previously unknown issues with certain devices and worked with engineers overseas to fix them. For one of the issues that concerned thermals, I designed an injection molded part to fix it. I’m proud that one of my designs is in the tooling phase right now. I made a few more engineering drawings for various parts that are also in the tooling/production phase. My biggest project, though, was the complete redesign of one of our best-selling products. I took in feedback about the previous product that we OEM’ed; prototyped an entirely fresh design; iterated my design based on feedback from stores, users, and colleagues; and brought my production ready design into the quoting phase before I sadly ran out of summer. Before working at mob armor, I had a decent grasp on how to design one-off parts for common manufacturing processes on basic machines like vertical mills and FDM 3d printers but had no idea how different the world of mass manufacturing really was.