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. What I'm looking for now is a team building something big, where I can own a subsystem and carry it from requirements to working hardware.

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

A two-part graduate project: machine and assemble a working rotary vane pump from stock, then redesign it for diesel service on a locomotive — 35 bar, −40 to 140 °F, 800 RPM — and release the design as a 21-sheet GD&T drawing package.

my part: housing, rotor & vane design, calcs, GD&T, machining 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

BU Robotics Club's tomato-harvesting robot. The end effector had to pluck tomatoes off the vine without crushing them, with one motor and a 3D-printed build — the robot took First Prize at MassRobotics' 2026 Form & Function Challenge.

my part: end-effector design + all machining 03 The finished PVT production unit - painted resin mount and key holding a toothpaste tube

A Consumer Product, Taken to Mass Production

Create a consumer product, then carry the one design through the full scaling sequence — EVT, DVT, and PVT builds into a priced mass-production plan — from a $46.55 hand-built unit to $6.97 all-in at 10,000 units.

my part: mount & key design, tooling approval, control plans 04 A teammate walks down the inclined clear acrylic walkway while two teammates watch in the makerspace.

Inclining Transparent Walkway (Vibram Senior Design)

A client-sponsored capstone for Vibram: a transparent walkway that indexes 0–40° so shoe soles can be filmed from below while a person walks — designed to a 500 lb load, delivered to their Boston lab, still in use.

my part: manufacturing lead, calcs, camera research

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 — A solo-built machine that taunts you — shuttling your candy around while you're anything but sad — and dispenses it after three sad faces in a row.
  • 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