PCH Lime Lab

My third and self-created co-op was at PCH Lime Lab, a product development consultancy in San Francisco. During my time, I worked on various consumer electronics products, ranging from wearables to food automation devices. My day to day was extremely different, varying from test fixture design, prototyping to test proof of concepts, creating drawings and CAD packages for CM.

The need for the tumble tester was to create a cycle machine to simulate use cases of products, such as purse or pocket environments. The difficulty of designing this device was to ensure that it was useful, by correlating to real life cycles of a product.

To begin, multiple IEC Environmental test standards were consulted; the closest standards included ingress, drop, and impact testing. This machine would be a combination of all three, and I used the metrics from the other tests to determine how to design this machine.

A user friendly interfacewas designed with a LCD and buttons for easy control of the cycles. The menutook the user through how the program runs; the user could then control how many cyclesthe test would perform and start the program. Multiple iterations of the buttonswere created to ensure that the tactile feel was correct. There are 4 arrow buttons, one for select, and one for reset/stopping the program.

Product Testing

In addition to the above cycle testing, there were a number of other product testing that needed to be done. Testing included fabric/wear testing, depression testing, drop testing, and IP67 rating testing, images shown below.