My First Internship — Elecnovo EV
Recently, I had completed my first internship at Elecnovo Pvt Ltd. This article consists of everything I did during my internship and what I learned during that time period.
Ever since publishing my first article on the Arduino, I began to work further towards understanding its utilities and functions, and my interest for the topic grew further. I did some amount of research and to better my understanding on the Arduino board, motors and electric circuits, I decided that I would apply for a few weeks summer internship at a Company that I had read an article about.
While applying for the internship, I also realised that the company’s office was located near my house, so the internship would be the perfect opportunity to broaden my skill set and learn new things.
Within a week of reaching out, they accepted my resume and I began to go to their office daily.
My internship experience
During my time at the company, my main project was working on an electric scooter prototype which they were building. In the scooter, they had installed their own electric BLDC (brushless direct current) hub motor on the front wheel, which had capabilities for acceleration and braking.
They taught me how the BLDC motors functioned, and how all the parts inside worked in unison to produce torque on the wheel, which allowed for acceleration and braking. They also taught me how the motor worked with the motor controller, which allowed the motor detect its position and make adjustments to the voltage supplied to the motor from the battery accordingly.
Along with the electric scooter, one of the employees also taught me how soldering was done, which a very important aspect for circuit building. He also taught me how circuit components such as MOSFETs and Capacitors worked.
I also got a complete hands-on experience, as I myself was asked to complete the circuit on the electric scooter after they disassembled it, and was also asked to test the scooter on the road after completing its circuit. This helped me further understand how the different components of the scooter, which were the motor, motor controller and battery worked.
It got me thinking about the constraints that real-life engineering faces vs the theory in books — things like battery power density, thrust to weight — more power — bigger battery — higher weight cycle of tradeoffs, packaging into restricted weight and volume margins, neatness of layout, design for manufacturability and maintainability (parts should be easy to troubleshoot and change), and also cost as 2-wheelers in India are a price conscious segment. I am pretty sure I will face such engineering challenges again in my life going forward and this exposure will help train my thought process.
All in all, the experience was rigorous but enjoyable, and I can safely say that I learned a lot about Electric Vehicles( EVs), their different components, their motors, electric circuits and programming using the Arduino IDE (C like language) for real world applications such as the motor controller programs. Working with real engineers and shadowing their day to day experiments in the lab, helping with experiments was something new to me.
