Dates: January to March 2014

Working with three other classmates, our fourth year design project was a custom electric longboard for use in commuting. Check out the video for the details (It won a department award for best advertisement)!

In addition to getting a chance to work with some RC components to put together something fun, we also managed to win a small award for best project -voted on by former Mechatronics engineering alumni!

Dates: May 2013 to August 2013
Location: Santa Clara, California
Position: Hardware Engineering

At Arista, I was a member of about 30 or so hardware engineers designing the circuit boards powering their network switches. Being an intern, I wasn’t able to design production boards that went to customers. However I was given the opportunity to design a test board (see picture on the right) for a switch controller board, which would be used in the factories to ensure the controller boards manufactured by Arista functioned correctly.

Being the sole designer of the board, I was able to take the design from beginning to end, including the following stages of the design:

1. Functional spec creation: Defined the hardware architecture of the board, as well as the registers used in the onboard Xilinx FPGA and Altera CPLD.
2. Schematic entry: Created board level schematic in DxDesigner. Exported netlist and devices list in order to facilitate layout.
3. Layout overview: guided and reviewed layout of components on the board before fabout and assembly of the test board.
4. Verilog coding: leveraged and adapted existing Verilog code for the onboard FPGA and CPLD, allowing storage and manipulation of data in PLD registers by the Device Under Test (ie. the switch controller board)
5. Bringup: debugged and reworked first batch of test boards delivered in order to make them functional. I had a particular issue with a twisted PCIe link that took me at least 4 days to fix. I also used this time to test and debug my verilog code.
6. Board re-spin: After finding all mistakes and ensuring the test board worked, I updated my schematics to fix the circuit errors and sent them out for a final production run.

I should note here that before the work term I had no experience working with DxDesigner, and minimal experience in Verilog or HDL coding. In addition to learning Verilog and using DxDesigner I also had the opportunity to evaluate a few CPU core power supplies for a different project -in particular for their response to high current loads and imbalanced phase currents.

Dates: January 2013 to March 2013

For our project design course in third year, my class was given the task of working in groups of five to design and build an autonomous boat that could navigate a rectangular pool of water. Being a competition, each boat’s performance was determined by measuring by it’s speed in the water with respect to it’s mass. In our boat design, my group used three IR distance sensors interfaced to an arduino microcontroller and a protoboard shield to detect the surroundings. Control was provided by using a proportional feedback system that controlled an RC boat rudder. As the lead mechanical designer and builder of the group, I spent a number of hours over the 3 week build period working with my team members to construct and optimize the shape and structure of our boat. We ran into a number of issues when testing and optimizing our boat design, including:

• hull planing and hydrodynamic drag
• electronics waterproofing
• high motor current draw and transistor overheating
• weight balance and instability
• motor vibration

Thankfully our hard work and testing paid off on competition day, with my group completing a lap in 11.5 seconds and tying for 1st place out of the 22 competing boats (see the video below)!

Dates: September 2012 to December 2012
Location: Cupertino, California
Position: Engineering Project Manager -iPhone/iPod/iPad accessories

In the fall of 2012, Apple introduced Lightning -the new connector interface for its mobile devices. As an intern in the accessories engineering department, I was tasked with performing and managing the failure analysis of customer returned lightning equipped accessories.

Dates: January 1st 2012 to April 27th 2012
Location: San Jose, California
Position: Hardware Design Engineering
Sample of work: Work Report

At Nuvation, I was part of a team that worked on the development of a
Battery Management System (BMS) reference design, particularly for use in future electric vehicles and grid energy storage systems.

In particular I worked on the schematic and circuit design of the Tank Controller Board -used to communicate with the Pack Management boards and interface the BMS to the rest of the vehicle.

To that end I used Altium Designer to create schematic symbols and sheets, LTSpice to simulate and evaluate the complex circuits, and the plain old internet in order to research and select IC”s and electrical components that would fulfill the requirements of the system.

And as a design meant for automobiles, there are a lot of requirements and elements to consider. Factors such as large operating temperatures, high current draws, large noise, and large transients ranging in the hundreds of volts were all needed to be taken into account when designing the circuits. As a reference design it was also important to ensure good documentation and flexibility, to ensure easy bringup and debugging (as well as future improvements).

I also did some hands on lab work as well, using equipment like multimeters, soldering irons, etc. in order to prototype parts of the circuit for use in a benchtop test unit (which also doubled as a tradeshow demo).

A good example of some of the work I did can be found in my work report. In this report I talk about the design and simulation of a surge stopper circuit, used to protect the sensitive integrated circuitry of the board from the harsh transients of a car’s 12V battery.

Dates: May 2, 2011 to August 26, 2011
Location: Kitchener, Ontario
Position: Electrical/Mechanical Engineering
Sample of work: Work Report

At Christie, I was part of the Entertainment Systems Business Unit (ESBU) -the department that designs digital projectors for use in movie theaters.

In particular I worked on two main projects throughout the term: one electrical and one mechanical. The electrical project was for future product development, while the mechanical project was for existing improvement.

The electrical project consisted of the testing of placement and selection of bypass capacitors. Common decoupling/bypass methods of circuits on PCB’s use rules of thumbs or simulators in order to determine the number and value of capacitors to use. The tests I performed were to test the effectiveness of each decoupling rule of thumb, as well as the accuracy of a PCB decoupling excel based tool.  This project taught me a lot about concepts such as PCB mutual inductance, embedded capacitance, as well as the non-ideal frequency-dependent nature of capacitors. I also gained some hands on skills, like working with a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) and how to surface mount solder small components (as small as 0201).

The mechanical project was the development of a method to improve the airflow and cooling of one of the projector model’s electronics. In particular, the cinema processing FPGA on one of the projector’s PCB’s was receiving insufficient airflow and was heating up to almost 90 degrees Celsius. This overheating affected nearly 2500 projectors in the field. I worked with an engineer to experiment a number of ways in order to improve this cooling, and came up with the idea to change the normally linear flow into a more circular flow (see left image). This simple change significantly improved the airflow of the FPGA and dropped its temperature by 30 degrees Celsius.

Dates: June 2010 to Present

A 3D printer in layman’s terms takes a computer drawing of an object (for example something rendered in Solidworks for example), and produces a physical representation of the object by melting and depositing a thermoplastic layer by layer.

Inspired by the open source Reprap project, my friend David and I got together in the summer of 2010 to try and design and construct our own 3D printer. Because of the busy lives we both have (and the effects of co-op), progress has been slow. We are committed to finishing it off though however.

Mechanical/Electrical Design:

The mechanical systems of the printer are our own design and construction. The most important mechanical components are the cartesian stages (x,y,z) in which the printhead moves. I went through a couple of design iterations for the motion of the stages. The first design had the z stage rising on four separate threaded rods, connected together with a long timing belt (left image, with the four cylinders holding up the platform). Movement in the x and y axes was to be provided by using brass bushings and aluminum rod. This proved to be problematic because of the difficulty of securing bushings to a moving stage and the large amount of friction associated with the movement.

The second design iteration (central image) consisted of replacing the bushing and rod bearing with teflon and polycarbonate glides. This again was abandoned because of perceived problems with friction and construction difficulty. The final design consisted of using the frame of the machine as the bearing guides themselves, and crafting custom slides using ball bearings and larger aluminum angle (right image). This solved any friction issues, and also allowed for greater movement in the x-y direction. The z stage was also modified and became a cantilevered surface, rather than four distinct risers. This made the construction much more simple, and allowed the z stage to be driven directly by a stepper motor rather than through a timing belt.

The electronics of the printer are also fairly simple at the moment. An Arduino Mega microcontroller hooked up to four stepper motor drivers (one for each stage, and one for the extruder mechanism). We’ve got a board dedicated for the plastic melting mechanism, but that hasn’t been finalized or hooked up yet. The next steps on the project are the creation of the hot end, and finally the software to make the machine start printing.

We’ve got a blogger blog going on that documents our (slow) progress on the machine. Click on heading of this page to check it out!

Dates: January 4, 2010 to April 20, 2010
Location: Brampton, Ontario
Position: Advanced Systems Engineering
Sample Work: Work Report

At MDA Space Missions, I was part of the Advanced Systems Engineering team, which develops vehicle concepts and for potential space exploration missions for the Canadian Space Agency and NASA.

In particular I worked on the development of a lunar manned rover concept, as well as a lunar lander offloader. For the lunar manned rover concept I was responsible for the concept and CAD modelling (in Unigraphics NX) of the Human Machine Interface, as well as helping to brainstorm ideas for the drivetrain. As a member of the team, I also got to help them present the design to senior managers and engineers at the Canadian Space Agency’s Headquarters in Montreal (see right image).

For the lunar lander offloader I helped in the concept development of robot that would be able to offload a manned lunar rover, while weighing under 500kg and fitting within a confined space. The tight space and weight requirements led to a hybrid forklift and crane concept that could transport both the 2 ton rover and itself off the lander and onto the lunar surface.

In addition to those two projects I also helped with the mission architecture planning of an orbital satellite servicing and refueling vehicle.

Dates: September 2006 to April 2009
Project link: here

Every year NASA and the National Space Society (NSS) host an international contest for middle and high school students to design a permanent space station concept that could be built in 50 years. I participated in the contest for three years, and in my final year of high school I managed to win the contest! As a grand prize winner, I got to attend and present my project at the 2009 International Space Development Conference (ISDC 2009) in Orlando Florida, where I got to meet various members of the aerospace industry, as well as have Buzz Aldrin (the 2nd man on the moon) present my award!

Although it is merely a concept with no future of being built, the contest was a chance for me to demonstrate my logical thinking and creativity skills, and apply it to a design problem. I took the contest as an opportunity to design something realistic, so I spent 6 months between September and March researching systems, vehicles and materials used in past space missions. Concepts such as modularity, mass production, and existing technology were all ideals i tried to incorporate in the design.