Avionics Test Engineering Internship

  Working at SpaceX was a dream come true, even when it was only for a three month internship. I've always loved space, including the technology related to it, as I know many others also do. I grew as a Trekkie, watching endless hours of rubbermaid tubs filled with VHS recordings of the original series, The Next Generation, and Voyager. As someone with a multi-disciplinary background, and with a special focus on robotics and automation, test engineering was a very good fit!

  During this internship, my primary goal was to create re-usable components for high pressure test systems. This involved interfacing with test rack equipment which could apply pressure to DUTs, and would then validate their response and performance to this stimulus. While I'd written quite a bit of Python prior to this, the standards for these components were (understandably!) much higher than I'd encountered previously. This effectively meant that the internship was a bit of a crash course in TDD, as being able to verify that the tests would apply the correct stimulus, and in the correct way, helped reduce the chances of damaging DUTs, or supporting test equipment. As part of this effort, I also made significant improvements to the driver for the piece of test equipment which controlled how pressure was applied. While doing so, I encountered a fair number of discrepancies in the documentation and VISA commands for this device. I ended up contacting the company and was put in contact with their engineering department, where I then drove fixes to their firmware and documentation, ultimately resulting in a fully functional test setup. Since I ended up working for the company long-term, I know that these components were used, and likely still are, for many pressure-related validation tests at the company and worked well!

  There were also a couple of side projects I worked on while here. The first was small Python app which automated the creation of Jira work tickets for the Lifecycle Engineering Team. Previously, a member of that team on a rotating schedule would manually create counterpart Jira tickets associated to a proprietary tracking system created in-house. By manually querying the SQL database for this proprietary app, and making it run on a schedule, tickets were made and assigned to the appropriate teams automatically, improving the response time to these tickets, and removing the potential for errors during the previously manual copy/pasting efforts. In my first week, I also debugged a custom circuit board for a motor controller test system, finding the location of a dead short, directing a tech to repair the failure, and then verified that the board functioned correctly afterwards. The final small project I worked on was manually running the shock tests in the qualification efforts for a piece of spaceflight networking gear while its owner, a friend, could not be present.