Over the course of the past year, myself and a team of four other students have worked together on a senior design project, similar to a capstone project for our degree. This experience has been instrumental in reinforcing much of what I have learned in my internships about what engineering in industry looks like, as well as giving me the opportunity to apply the skills that Iowa State has taught me to an interesting challenge.
The project that we were assigned was called the ‘Plastic Machine Embedded IOT Controller.’ Essentially, a small company had designed a working injection molding machine, but wanted to improve it’s accuracy and provide a more user friendly interface for customers. We were to design a PCB cape for a per-existing micro-controller framework (Beagle Bone Black, which will be referred to as BBB here on out) to provide these two functionalities.
As one of the electrical engineering students on the team, I was on the PCB design team, focusing on design, testing, and laying out circuitry for the cape. We had three different revisions of our main PCB, and lots more revisions of individual circuits on the board. Below I will attach both our final project document and the poster which we presented on our process and results.
At the end of the project, we have produced an excellent framework for either implementation into our clients current injection molder, or further development by our client’s engineers.
Evan Pasero 