PCEC News
Grand Valley State University and DornerWorks are guiding New Engineers Towards Success
November 21, 2022
“GVSU’s engineering co-op program has allowed us to grow organically and sustainably with a guaranteed engineering bandwidth of student interns year-round, usually resulting in full-time and long-term engineering employment afterwards,” says DornerWorks Founder and Owner David K. Dorner.
“This has allowed DornerWorks to grow engineering talent within our own staff consistently over the years with local, home-grown engineers. And this experience has helped each and every student grow their own personal resume as we put them to work on real-world engineering projects. We are very thankful for such a tremendous engineering university program right in our back yard and are very pleased to give back as a sponsor for their new Engineering Innovation Design Center!”
GVSU’s Padnos College of Engineering and Computing has long been the main building for Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CE) students, along with Cybersecurity, Information Technology (IT) and many others. In 2022 the university unveiled the Grand Valley State University Shape Corp. Innovation Center. The new facility features lab rooms and large project development spaces that future engineers will use to design, prototype, and build. The team sponsored by DornerWorks built an American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreter using a FPGA development board and machine learning algorithm from Xilinx hooked up to a camera and TV monitor. Holding up one’s hand in the form of a character from the ASL alphabet, the camera ingests the image, which is processed on the Xilinx board using a machine learning algorithm and displays the result in the form of a box around the hand indicating the character along with an estimated measure of accuracy.
Several members of this team also served as co-op students
at DornerWorks and brought their talents to work with our engineering
team during their employment. GVSU graduate, former co-op student and
current full-time engineer in DornerWorks’ Medical Solutions Group,
Kendra Francis is now gaining real-world experience working on
development the embedded software for an electromechanical prosthetic.
“GVSU prepared me for my current role in the Medical group by allowing
me to obtain hands on experience with embedded systems,” she says.
“The labs and projects within the curriculum in combination with my
co-op rotations at DW prepared me to enter my full-time career with
confidence in my technical abilities.”
DornerWorks IoT Engineering Group Engineer Josh Johnston
participated in the same co-op cohort and as a full-time engineer is
working with another DornerWorks team member in porting the codebase
from an obsolete Bluetooth controller to a new one. “The biggest
factor that’s at play in my current project is not necessarily the
technical knowledge that I learned at GVSU (although that has
obviously played an important role), but it has more so been my
ability to teach myself new things and problem solve,” Johnston says.
“My current project required me to learn a new language and to learn a
new communication protocol (Bluetooth). GVSU helped me exercise my
ability to do this over the years.”
FPGA Design Architect Corrin Meyer acted as the “customer
contact” for the GVSU team and set the technical requirements for the
project. “I helped them develop a project plan,” he says. “This
involved thinking through how to approach the problem in steps that
made sense. Additionally, because of this project was quite
technically challenging, we developed a plan that could scale. This
meant that we set a goal for the project that we thought the team
could make even if they ran into a lot of difficulties.”
DornerWorks has a long and mutually beneficial relationship with
GVSU’s co-op program for nearly two decades. President Shawn Isenhoff
recalls joining DornerWorks 15 years ago, when an intern was
occasionally brought in from one of a few universities.
“Even at that point GVSU stood out for their program, where
interns have multiple rounds of internship and are therefore able to
really perform at the level of a someone post-graduation even before
they graduate,” Isenhoff says. “GVSU also stood out for their
solicitation to both the interns and our company of what can better
prepare the students for the needs we have and what can create a
better experience for the students. This senior design project is an
example of that relationship strengthening in that the professors were
willing to stretch the design into FPGAs per our direction and this is
something the professors are not as familiar with and have a more
challenging time mentoring the students on. GVSU’s willingness to
incorporate the needs of DornerWorks has been a steady part of the
relationship we have had. That continued pursuit and consideration is
much appreciated.”
View the original story posted in DornerWorks website