Experience Matters - Grand Valley State University

Co-op III: Ultrasonic Device Development

Matthew
Major: Electrical Engineering Our team is developing an ultrasonic cosmetic device, and I played a direct role in assessment of the amplifier system driving the ultrasound. By identifying differences in the amplifier's behavior during use, it became possible to use feedback to predict different states of the device and make recommendations to the user.

Final Co-op

Manuel
Major: Electrical Engineering Electrical layout of component used in the conveyor system. Review of drawings. Review of PLC codes. Description of Operation for a system. AutoCAD work and simulation of PLC programs and making any changes needed

Gentex - E.E.

Jared
Major: Electrical Engineering I developed and maintained hardware and software used for testing the various functions of Gentex products during the final assembly process.

High Voltage

Jacob
Major: Electrical Engineering I worked on arc flash studies, substation testing, and small generation site projects (designing, testing, and calibrating).

PLC's

Corey
Major: Electrical Engineering I was assigned to the headrest launch division where we assemble machines that bend and put notches in the metal headrest tubes. My major task for the Fall semester included: Leading the controls portion of a 3 machine builds. Learning how to configure Ethernet I/O modules and a different PLC programming language. Redesign our control panel for the machines we build, so that the technician has better access to important components during installation and troubleshooting. Work with the design engineer to ensure the controls part of a new machine has all components necessary and places to professionally route wires.

Invaluable Controls Engineering Experience

Daniel
Major: Electrical Engineering This was my third co-op and I was assigned my own projects costing thousands of dollars. I designed controls for different machines, programmed different robots, worked on different visions systems and programmed PLCs for different machines.

Electrical Power

Jacob
Major: Electrical Engineering I worked on arc flash studies, substation testing, and landfill generation projects (designing, testing, and calibrating).

Great experience at Gill Electronics!

Luke
Major: Electrical Engineering The main project I was tasked to do this semester was to create an evaluation receiver for companies to be able to evaluate our wireless charging products. It involved a series of buttons, programming, tuning a resonator, and designing the schematics and circuit boards. It was a success! Another project I have been doing this semester is creating an End-of-Line test program for the manufacturers to test the product when it is finished. This involved lots of programming and creating a GUI. Other tasks that I have done include designing other evaluation boards, debugging our product, working with mechanical engineers to design our products, making schematics and board layouts on Eagle, learning about EMC issues and how to solve those, and trying to keep my desk clean.

Controls Engineer

Nathan
Major: Electrical Engineering This semester I researched weld gas controllers and how we could communicate to a programmable logic controller when the weld gas controller faults. I also added a touch screen to interface with a plc on a massive hydraulic press that will change the shutoff point pressure. Other than those two projects I did a bit of print work and ordering parts.

Engineering Co-op

Neal
Major: Electrical Engineering My work focused on assisting in maintaining the company's building monitoring system. I also spent a great deal of time doing office work and assisting in work that needed to be done by coworkers.

Electrical Engineering Internship

Alex
Major: Electrical Engineering The department I worked with for this co-op was the advanced product development department. I performed a variety of tests on different parts for benchmarking and general research. I also worked with other engineers to design and construct various parts for testing and innovation.

Magnum Engineering

Jesse
Major: Electrical Engineering This semester I designed a device for our shop that monitored the water flowing into our washing machine. This device consisted of an LCD, push-button/rotary encoder user interface, and a micro-controller. I also did some testing of existing products for a local fish trolling motor company and created a way of scoring their products in a concrete manner. The last project that I worked on was a wireless device that could control the volume of the music in the shop. This was needed because there was no easy way to turn the volume down when customers came for visits. So a wireless remote and audio in-line base were designed to meet these needs.

Co-op at JCI / Visteon

Chris
Major: Electrical Engineering Performed numerous tests on a Model Year 16 Head-Up Display. Wrote multiple programs for testing interfaces and some smaller programs to perform calculations. Made a printed circuit board (PCB) for splitting video between a source and the HUD. Participated in testing on a Model Year 14 instrument cluster. Designed an interface to run a Display Color Analyzer remotely.

Perrigo Co-op 2

Neal
Major: Electrical Engineering At Perrigo I worked in the Facilities Engineering department. I was responsible for filling out paperwork that would be used to enter new facilities equipment into a database, for tracking and maintenance reasons. I spent time working on creating software models for closed loop water piping systems. I also worked with controls technicians to monitor and maintain our Building Management System.

RFID

Caleb
Major: Electrical Engineering I have been working at Cascade Engineering for the subsidiary of Xtreme RFID for almost 2 years now. Over this time period I have been able to go from full-time during breaks and co-ops to part-time while taking classes. Since starting to work here, I have increased in responsibility from being someone who is constantly testing RFID tags for product development purposes to a person who has automated much of my testing and has moved on to learning how to use thermal-transfer printing with a Zebra printer on RFID inlays to specialized testing, setting up a lab, Solidworks work occasionally, not counting the occasional fab work that I am requested to do. As my title describes testing and product development, I do a lot of other specified testing with RFID handhelds and dock doors to determine optimum locations for RFID tags on bins and other parts. I have also done some work in deciding which inlay would best be placed in other specified tags and applications.

Coop 3

Julio
Major: Electrical Engineering I was in charge of the design and development of vision recognition projects and testing projects such as a Thermal Camera, part recognition and part inspection.

DornerWorks EE Internship Rotation 3

Josh
Major: Electrical Engineering Worked with AngularJS, JavaScript, Python, Jenkins CI server, Node.js, Flask web framework, SQL Alchemy databases etc. to create a rough draft of a requirements management tool meant to be used in house and potentially sold to manage project requirements. Communicated between a server which controlled the database, the converter which polled the Git repository for changes with the CI server, and the frontend written in JavaScript. Worked for a large company in the area on an ITAR protected project involving debug tests in the Ada language using GDB for use in their product; verification of low-level requirements by these tests.

Second Semester at Medallion

Fred
Major: Electrical Engineering I have been working at Medallion part time since my first co-op semester ended last summer. This semester I was focused primarily on organizational and business/engineering system improvement.

Industrial Automation

Kevin
Major: Electrical Engineering The second internship at JR Automation was excellent! While working with good people at JR, I was exposed to new technology in the automation industry and gained valuable engineering experience working on multiple projects. I worked with various vision systems, sensors, and software in the research and development lab and worked out on the floor to provide support for different projects. At JR, I found new challenges with every project and it was exciting to help find solutions to the different kinds of project problems. With all of the automation equipment to choose from, it can be difficult to find the most reliable and inexpensive component or vision system to integrate into a given project.

My Co-op Experience

Chris
Major: Electrical Engineering As the company is a small organization, I had actual responsibilities throughout my co-op semester. My main project was to create a "dummy" phone that will be used to show of the technologies and the cool features which it can accomplish. This device incorporates a battery charging circuit, a touchscreen LCD w/ drivers, and many other small circuits. I was also on the R&D team for the new receiver boards and was the engineer who did most of the testing on our products.

Fall Controls Experience

Carl
Major: Electrical Engineering Controls engineering at JR Automation entails a wide variety of different tasks in order to build even the simplest of machinery. I was able to start projects from the ground up and see the finished product a few months later. The key tasks to be completed began with designing electrical prints. This entails every little aspect of electrical design from calculating robot in rush currents and transformer sizes to creating the BOM and ordering the required components. Other tasks include HMI and PLC programming. Both of these components are designed from the ground up and include many hours of work. The final part of the build process is to debug the machine. This could mean debug the I/O or the code itself.

Autocam Co-op

Timothy
Major: Electrical Engineering I acted as an assistant to a production/quality manufacturing engineer. This involves ensuring that product flows evenly throughout the process in a manner that facilitates quality and the proper quantity.

Electrical Engineering at an Architectural and Engineering firm

Greg
Major: Electrical Engineering I focused on lighting system layouts in education facilities as well as health care facilities. Using various programs and tools I would evaluate light outputs at various elevations above floor level to comply with building codes and standard lighting requirements. I also worked with supervisor's and other electrical engineers to design lighting layouts to provide the customer with a solution that would compliment the architectural details of the building.

Magna Mirrors Second Co-op Semester

Alexander
Major: Electrical Engineering This semester I have worked on a wide variety of projects, some of which include: -Thermal imaging -Thermal resilience testing -Environmental conditions testing -Light flicker testing -Spot meter testing -Circuit board assembly -Circuit development -Patent investigations -Innovation presentation

It Only Gets Better

Justin
Major: Electrical Engineering During my four months at JR, I got to experience a lot of independent work. I was very busy from start to stop, and always looked forward to going in. My first couple weeks I started on a rather large, semi-intimidating machine. I had another controls engineer working on a similar machine near me that I could go to with questions, and he had a lot of the base code written that could be transferred over to mine. However, most of my work was done on my own, figuring out how different aspects and components of my machine worked. I spent most of my time on this machine. It used sonic welders to melt some plastic parts together, and a CO2 laser to cut other plastic apart. It was very cool, and a great experience. With this machine I got very familiar with these sonic welders. So much so that this other engineer had me work on his remaining projects that utilized them. All together, I was in on 9 different machines. 8 of the 9 were for this engineer and 6 of those 8 had sonics on them. It was a rewarding feeling to have the engineer have total faith in my work and let me work independently. For the most part, he would come check my work every so often, and answer most of my questions I had. Along the way, I also ran into a few problems. These trials helped me learn better what it means to be a controls engineer and how to think on my feet.