Unique Signal Interlock

The largest and most ambitious engineering project I have done to date is my senior design capstone project. My team of 7 people chose to work with Los Alamos National Laboratory to create a two-factor authentication electromechanical locking device, or in other words an unpickable lock. On my team I played the role of electromechanical engineer, so I was in charge of all the electronics on the device, although I also became a lead manufacturing engineer. One of the largest challenges of this project was to make the lock as difficult as possible to pick for someone not trained in the device while still remaining intuitive and reliable to use for someone trained in opening it. To solve this the lock has two separate parts, first, 3 internal cylinders which need to be spun to a certain alignment by a special key, and second, a spectrometer which needs a morse code password from a specific laser key. I was in charge of the laser subsystem, this involved lots of prototyping for the laser key housing, coding and trouble shooting the spectrometer and creating custom PCBs for the internals of the system. Eventually we presented our project at the year-end expo, and won awards for testing and design ideation. An exciting result from our testing was that a trained user had a 96% pass rate and untrained users had a 100% fail rate. After the expo Los Alamos was pleased and decided to take our design for potential use.

In this project, I learned so much about electronics, PCBs, lasers, high end additive manufacturing, precision machining, and leadership. I am most proud of the team leadership role I took on while still being able to get a lot of high quality work done.

The final expo poster, final report, and images and videos of expo are shown below. Feel free to click around and check them out.