Firmware Engineering Intern
Jun – Aug 2026Bausch + Lomb · St. Louis, MO
Designed closed-loop stepper motor control firmware for a surgical device, using a TMC2160 motor driver to precisely position a mechanical component, one with no physical limit switch to detect when it reached the end of its travel.
Built a stall-detection homing routine that used the driver's built-in load-feedback to infer that limit electronically instead. Without it, the motor would keep driving past the mechanical stop, binding the gear train under continued torque. Most of the effort went into tuning the stall threshold so it triggered reliably at the true limit without false-triggering during normal operation.
Separately, contributed to the software requirements, architecture, and design documentation (SRS/SAS/SDD) for a glaucoma surgery platform, the paperwork that defines what the software is supposed to do and how it's built, which regulated medical devices require by FDA before they can ship.