Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE)

Over the summer, I led the design and build of a new electronics enclosure for my student liquid-rocket team to control our test stand and log data during hot-fire campaigns. I architected the system around a LabJack T7 for data acquisition and a PLC for valve control, enabling us to actuate six valves and read seven pressure transducers and two sets of load cells with room for future expansion. Compared to previous setups, I simplified the wiring and modularized the I/O so new features could be added quickly. I wrote the control and logging software in LabVIEW, integrated it with the existing hardware, and debugged a major PLC failure by tracing a hardware fault with an oscilloscope and re-soldering a shorted MOSFET. The updated system ran reliably through three successful hot-fire tests, giving me direct experience setting up engineering tests, instrumenting hardware, capturing clean data, and documenting configurations and results.

Hardware

Enclosure

VEVOR Steel Electrical Box 24'' x 24'' x 8''. Both latches broke so we replaced them. The hinges seem fine.

Bottom Panel

Custom bottom panel from SendCutSend
Ethercon
Power Not gonna use this on the next version, already broke one of the latches on it. This one next time (or maybe without the switch because panel space is limited)
Valve, load cell and pressure transducer: Panel and wire. In different pin numbers. These are quite large, and we're running out of room.
Unsure which thermocouple panel connector we're using.

Top Row

Middle Row

Blade fuse terminals
Random terminals, ground and 24V
Labjack breakout

Bottom Row

LabVIEW

My friend Kasper used LabVIEW to control the PLC and LabJack.