Akash Patel / Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineer · Boston University BS '25, MS '26

Mechanisms, machined parts, and the documents that prove them.

This site documents seven of my builds, from a competition-winning tomato-harvesting gripper to a diesel pump with a fully released GD&T drawing package. Every page is written the way the work actually went: the requirements, what broke, how it was fixed, and the numbers we measured.

I finished my M.S. in mechanical engineering this year, and I'm looking for a hardware role where the machine has to run every day, not just demo. I want to own a mechanism from its requirements through the test data that proves it.

Index updated 2026-09-18

01 Machined aluminum vane pump head-on: clear front plate, slotted rotor and vanes, center bearing, two barbed fittings below.

Rotary Vane Pump: Machined Build + Diesel Locomotive Redesign

The first radial-gap stack-up went negative — worst case, the rotor touched the housing, the exact sparking scenario diesel service forbids.

21 released sheets, drawn–checked–approved my part: stack-ups, calcs, machining, drawing approval 02 Robot arm on an aluminum-rail gantry reaching toward a red tomato on a green vine-covered wall in a netted test cell.

AgroBot Tomato-Harvesting End Effector

The first fins were about 1 cm wide — a wet tomato was far too likely to slip out, so I doubled them.

First Prize, MassRobotics Form & Function 2026 my part: end-effector design + all machining 03 Yellow 3D-printed wall dispenser on a white wall squeezing a Davids toothpaste tube through its slotted turn key.

A Consumer Product, Taken to Mass Production

The first EVT unit failed 8 of 15 quality tests, and the DVT base shattered in the drop test.

PVT $46.55 → $5.41 at 10,000 units my part: mount & key design, tooling approval, MP scaling 04 A teammate walks down the inclined clear acrylic walkway while two teammates watch in the makerspace.

Inclining Transparent Walkway (Vibram Senior Design)

Our lead concept — a beach-chair indexing mechanism — passed FEA at high angles and failed at low ones; we killed it two-thirds through and bought gym benches.

500 lb: a 250 lb walker, doubled for safety my part: calcs, machining & assembly lead (joint)

Smaller builds

  • 05 Automated Drink Pourer — Fill a line of cups automatically: a 2.5-DOF Cartesian gantry plus a peristaltic pump, pivoted halfway when icing proved unpumpable.
  • 06 Emotion-Detecting Candy Machine — Get candy only by looking sad: a solo-built machine that classifies faces happy or sad at around 60–65% and taunts the happy.
  • 07 Point-to-Point Laser Communication System — Send messages with nothing but light: a 4-bit laser blink code between two stations — 8 of 10 end-to-end trials received correctly.

Tools, each tied to a build

Resume · Contact · akashp9292@gmail.com