This section shows some of the projects I had worked on in my time with 908 Devices as a Product Engineer and Manufacturing Engineer.
During my time with 908 Devices my main role as a manufacturing engineer was overseeing production test rigs and fixtures. I maintained and improved upon existing fixtures, designed new fixtures from the ground up, and assisted production technicians and the operations team with integrating new testing equipment and any troubleshooting.
Alongside my main role, I was responsible for many side tasks:
Alongside my main role, I was responsible for many side tasks:
- Scheduled yearly tool/equipment calibration for the production floor and clean room through Essco and Mettler Toledo. Set up their technicians with the materials and of course all out-of-calibration tools and equipment. All tool calibration info was tracked through Jira and went through me before entering or exiting the system.
- Regularly worked with CAD parts, assemblies and drawings for necessary revisions. Tracked all revisions in Solidworks PDM.
- Handled Engineering Change Orders for said revisions with Arena PLM, as well as create new PN's and BoMs with all necessary sourcing, cost, and documentation.
- Oversee R&D 3D printers. I maintained and upgraded our fleet of Prusas, ran print jobs for colleagues.
- Spearheaded the upbringing of a new production and manufacturing facility out of state. My team traveled to the facility with our equipment, set up production stations, populated them with my test rigs and fixtures, and trained technicians on the equipment procedures and software over the course of 2-3 days visiting.
- Briefly took on a technician role, running hundreds of units through testing on the rigs I designed to meet shipping deadlines during a busy stretch.
Production Test Fixtures
Sensitivity Rig
The sensitivity rig was the first production test rig I picked up after joining 908 Devices' operations team. My first task with this rig was improving upon the vapor system as the existing setups had a inconsistencies in the air to analyte ratios. I had experimented with some flow regulators and flow controllers, tested various plumbing arrangements across our three gasses, and ran GR&R tests with our production floor units for repeatability in test results.
After improving the vapor system I refined the design of the fixture as the previous two were left in their prototype stage. I cleaned up the mess of wires by designing an electronics enclosure and mounting components that were previously free floating. The rig had been powered by three separate power supplies so I integrated an AC/DC converter with dedicated AC and DC busses to have the entire system powered off a single outlet as opposed to three. Most importantly I had designed and installed a failsafe mechanism to prevent any thermal runaway in the system. It used the alarm system of the PID controller wired up to a thermocouple and relay that cut all power to the rig when exceeding the intended safe temperature levels. Additionally I set up each rig with a lockout tagout system as no production floor equipment had previously used them, to avoid wip equipment from being used by technicians.
After improving the vapor system I refined the design of the fixture as the previous two were left in their prototype stage. I cleaned up the mess of wires by designing an electronics enclosure and mounting components that were previously free floating. The rig had been powered by three separate power supplies so I integrated an AC/DC converter with dedicated AC and DC busses to have the entire system powered off a single outlet as opposed to three. Most importantly I had designed and installed a failsafe mechanism to prevent any thermal runaway in the system. It used the alarm system of the PID controller wired up to a thermocouple and relay that cut all power to the rig when exceeding the intended safe temperature levels. Additionally I set up each rig with a lockout tagout system as no production floor equipment had previously used them, to avoid wip equipment from being used by technicians.
P3 Pump Rig
Following the sensitivity rig I worked on the P3 pump rig. Another rig left in a rats nest of wires as a functional prototype, I cleaned up the design of this fixture. I made a custom electronics enclosure that would ultimately go on to be a universal component for other fixtures as many share similar boards. I designed a sleeker base to hold the pump, manometer, and flow controller. Overall the fixture was much easier to navigate with only the necessary cables being accessible, boards being tucked away inside their enclosure but still visible to technicians to confirm functionality during testing, and a more presentable piece of equipment for our tours and investors to see when they walk through the production floor.
Precon Rig
The precon rig shared many similarities with the sensitivity rig as it performed sensitivity tests on an equivalent component to on of our products, for a different product we helped another company produce and test. With one of my goals being making our vast array of rigs and fixtures easy to track and maintain, this one used many of the same schematics and features used in the sensitivity rig, and detailed below, the same accompanying universal fixture for mounting parts to test.
Universal Test Fixture
The universal test fixture was one of my favorite projects to work on. Before this, production used either customer units to run tests, or cobbled together frames from old RMA units. This was something operations wanted to get away from so I set out to create a universal test fixture that with small swaps of a board or two, would be usable with the majority of test rigs we had on the production floor. This one fixture could be used for components across many product lines. AVCAD, MX908, Rebel, amongst other product lines, each had a handful of boards and components that could all be tested on this universal test fixture. This eliminated the need for the many different fixtures and frames previously used and consolidated them to one easy to track/maintain fixture assembly and solved our issue of using old RMA and customer units for testing.
Burn In Rack
The burn in rack was designed to break in up to 84 newly built P3 pumps. 12 P3 pumps per shelf, 7 shelves. Each shelf had a custom built wire harness placed under custom mats to connect the 12 pumps to a power supply which would keep them spun up for 24 hours. In designing this rack air circulation was key as this many pumps running simultaneously tends to generate lots of heat. Each shelf was backed with a set of fans that would pull cool air through the vented rear door over the pumps while a top level set of fans vented the hot air out of the server rack keeping cool air in circulation. I built a handful of these burn in racks for P3 pumps and Gemini pumps in both the Boston production facility and again in the Danbury CT location when I was tasked with setting them up to start manufacturing our products.