Experience Matters - Grand Valley State University

JR Automation Co-Op

Wiliam
Major: Electrical Engineering I was a part of a large team of controls engineers. This specific project is expected to last over a year and will be the largest yet though JR. My part in the project was to assist in the electrical/ pneumatic drawings and other data that the customer required. On a day to day basis, I checked drawings, created drawings, designed enclosure layouts, performed heating, pneumatic, and electrical calculations for the controls engineers that I work with.

Robotics at its Best - CO-OP I

Ryan
Major: Electrical Engineering My first month at JR involved editing electrical and pneumatic prints, minor PLC programming, and HMI programming for a large assembly line. After the assembly line was finished, I was assigned my own project. I started off by spec'ing the right components for the machine, and performing power and pneumatic calculations. The next step was electrical, pneumatic, and control panel design. After the design and bill of materials were approved by the customer, I started the PLC and HMI programming. The last phase I was involved in before the semester ended was powering on the machine and debugging my code.

Traveling The World as an Engineer

Christian
Major: Electrical Engineering I worked as a controls engineer. which means my primary objective was to design, test and commission massive pieces of industrial machinery and robotics

A Summer w/o Wires

Chris
Major: Electrical Engineering This summer I did the majority of my work with receiver testing. This involved testing numerous receivers that had a wide variety of issues. Early on, the weak link within the system was the Lightning connector, then after some full charging tests, a thermal issue was discovered, so I got to do the testing & solution for that issue as well. Throughout the semester I was also the sole Engineer designing a detection circuit in a powerful Magnetic Field.

Automation Technology at JR

Kevin
Major: Electrical Engineering Tasks for projects completed were schematic diagrams of pneumatic and electrical systems for both Nissan and Ford in which processes included application of urethane and other hazardous material. Other tasks included programming vision software assisted cameras to distinguish vehicle door handle parts in a stage of a complex process. Also, other tasks included staging and some programming of human machine interface software for operator and machine communication. These large projects are ongoing and long term commitments are essential to the success of these projects.

Co-op at Visteon

Chris
Major: Electrical Engineering Power supply efficiency testing on Telematics Control Unit (TCU) Back-up battery temperature testing under loading for TCU DTMF signal processing using FFT analysis Prototyping with constant current for LED indicators for TCU integration Prototyping audio amplifiers for TCU integration Prototyping SEPIC/Boost DC-DC converters for TCU integration

Autocam Coop

Timothy
Major: Electrical Engineering I mainly ran machines during the first half of my experience here. This was important to my experience because I was able to learn the product line from the inside out. From there, I was assigned to an engineer to work on numerous area improvement projects. There is simply too much to list, but needless to say, I learned a lot about the processes, the procedures adopted by Autocam, and turn-machining.

DornerWorks EE Internship Rotation 2

Josh
Major: Electrical Engineering C/C++ code analysis/inspection, bringing it into compliance with MISRA rules APIs written for SW sample projects Linux kernel compilation, attempting to bring a real-time kernel into a hypervisor guest domain (Xen) Python code written for continuous integration server TeamCity

Final Co-Op Endeavour

Carl
Major: Electrical Engineering This semester has been a learning experience. I have been given tasks ranging from PLC programming, to electrical design. I worked on several assembly lines this semester for several customers. During these I was in charge of the electrical design, HMI design, PLC programming, electrical component ordering, and customer relations. I spent a great deal of time programming the logic and HMI of these door assembly stations. Throughout this time I also had to debug several aspect of the machine ranging from electrical issues to mechanical design concerns. I was able to do some vision testing for the machines as well. I worked a great deal with the customer during the build process of their machinery.

Twisthink Co-op Experience

Ryan
Major: Electrical Engineering Some tasks I completed where top level designs of a project and bench marking competitor pricing. I worked on a project that involved putting circuits together in the lab. Another big job I had was going through all the pin connections on a schematic for a circuit we had designed.

2nd Co-op Semester

Ryan
Major: Electrical Engineering This co-op term I modified a refrigerator with sensors to monitor the state of the light, the door, and monitor power consumption. These signals were then sent to a M2M router which made the data available online. I also worked a lot with some motion sensors, doing testing and data analysis. The rest of my time was spent doing a lot of ground truthing for sensors for several different applications.

JR Automation Controls

Will
Major: Electrical Engineering During my co-op rotation, I have worked on multiple machines. I have worked through the power up procedure for many machines, which requires a lot of troubleshooting. Tasks have included designing HMI layouts, print editing, and a little PLC programming.

Electrical Engineering at an Architecture/Engineering Firm

Greg
Major: Electrical Engineering I aided in the layout and design of lighting and electrical power distribution systems within buildings. I worked on projects for a wide range of customers that included primary/secondary education, higher education, government and commercial industries.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.