By Simone Panja
Who knew a semester-long engagement could evolve into a summer filled with innovation?
Ironically, my first real exposure to electronics and hardware came through a consulting engagement with Consult Your Community at NC State, where I worked as a business analyst for Phase Dock. During the engagement, I worked on designing a hierarchical menu system to control a robot used for K–12 education. I’m a junior majoring in computer science, but my previous experience was limited to software. Coming from a software background, I found myself surrounded by unfamiliar hardware jargon, everything from soldering to GPIO pins, and instead of being intimidated, I was fascinated. Naturally I wanted to learn more.
My Ask
After the semester ended, driven by a growing interest in physical computing (technology that bridges the physical and digital world), I reached out to Chris and Barbara at Phase Dock to see if I could continue working with them over the summer.
They said “Yes.”
That marked the beginning of an unexpected journey filled with curiosity, hands-on learning, and innovation.
Phase Dock is a small manufacturer of products that help students, professional engineers and hobbyists accelerate the prototyping and building of projects that use microcontrollers (such as Arduino) and single-board computers (such as Raspberry Pi). The Phase Dock production facility is about 20 minutes away from North Carolina State University, where I am a student, so it was a good match for a hands-on, in-person summer project.
Phase Dock’s Challenge
Phase Dock manufactures a number of their products using a CNC machine that relies on a Venturi vacuum system for workholding. This system requires compressed air to generate vacuum pressure. Because of its design, an operator must be present to carefully monitor vacuum pressure before activating the vacuum clamp. It requires constant attention, and the cost of failure is high.
The Venturi doesn’t need to run all the time, because the vacuum leaks down slowly. But if the clamping force drops too low because of insufficient vacuum, the workpiece gets thrown off the fixture, which can damage the cutting tool and the CNC machine–which is very bad! So the operator had been running compressed air constantly just to be safe. But that is very wasteful, hard on the air compressor, and noisy–which is hard on the operator.
Phase Dock needed an efficient, operator-friendly solution.
A Gateway into Physical Computing
Over the course of two-and-a-half months, I was given the freedom to design and build a human-machine interface (HMI) to monitor and automate the vacuum management process. This project became my gateway into physical computing while also allowing me to apply principles from the software development lifecycle.
What began with a modest setup, a 20×4 character LCD paired with an Arduino board, evolved into a far more powerful system: a 480×320 SPI-driven TFT display powered by an ESP32 microcontroller.
The result was an intuitive interface that improved operational efficiency, ultimately reducing wasted compressed air by 95%.
This is a four-part post. Join me as I walk through the technology behind this HMI and reflect on a summer of growth, problem-solving, and innovation, made possible by my mentors at Phase Dock. Part Two>>
