About
Greetings! I’m Malcolm Bornmann, Animax’s Summer 2021 Marketing and Events Intern. Welcome to the Animax Interns Blog, where I share first-hand accounts of what it’s like to work at this awesome company!
Today’s post is about Animax’s Summer 2021 Controls Intern, Devon Limcangco:
Working in Controls
Devon has utilized her background in electrical engineering to assist the Controls Team in a variety of ways. She helped refurbish the wiring of a puppetronic for a major theme park, ensured that the power supplies for a well-known costumed character was in working order before submission to a client, and brought a dinosaur to life by tuning motors, labeling cabinets, and pulling an e-stop button when the dinosaur needed a nap!
Devon is currently working in conjunction with our R&D team on a humanoid robot! The objective of this project is simple, yet complex to achieve: to get every electrical component as tiny as possible in order to ensure that movement and look is as natural as possible. To help with this effort, she has routed wires to mimic the veins of a human body, tied cables together with an Automation Knot, programmed maximum and minimum ranges of motion into our robot-moving software, soldered circuit boards, shopped for parts listed in our BOM, and created electrical drawings for a 4-budded e-stop that details such things as the location of safety relays and where ground and power go. Animatronics typically only have two e-stop buttons, so having one with four provides a unique learning opportunity for Devon!
Reflection
As a result of working on a multitude of projects, Devon’s been able to learn more about the engineering design process and how engineering teams must work together to solve problems. She additionally has grown her technical skill sets in all aspects of electrical engineering, while having fun and making friends in the process! When asked about how Animax has impacted her understanding of electrical engineering, Devon states, “Working at Animax has taught me just how creative the engineering field is and how wires and cables are like paint strokes that create great, beautiful artwork!”
