Over a six-month co-op at Desktop Metal, I gained a unique perspective working in the rapidly growing industry of additive manufacturing. I was fortunate to work on several impactful projects ranging from manufacturing test fixtures to high voltage PCB design for a production system. Working on these projects, I built up and applied technical electrical engineering knowledge through design reviews, project research, and experience debugging electrical hardware and firmware. Some of the skills I learned and used in these projects included high voltage PCB design, motor control, cable design, test bench tools, and project documentation.

One of the projects I designed was a test fixture for a complex contactor stack of a production machine, allowing for the manufacture of the contactor stack once the test fixture was provided to the manufacturer. The test fixture controlled the contactor stack and verified that it was wired correctly in each position. Having just learned PCB design on this co-op, I was able to apply it to make a reliable test fixture that would serve as the key to manufacturing this product.