Mechanical Design / Product Development

Adjustable Downlight Development

Mechanical development and testing for an adjustable lighting product with demanding packaging, motion, and thermal requirements.

Role: New Product Design Development Engineering Intern
Timeline: Internship dates to add
Project type: Employer project — high-level, non-confidential summary

Problem / objective

Support an adjustable product that needed to move through a wide range while fitting through a constrained ceiling opening and meeting thermal requirements.

Design process

Evaluated rotational and tilt motion at a high level.
Developed a way to check the interference envelope through a three-inch opening.
Built prototypes and iterated on tooling for manufacturing use.

Technical decisions

Used physical evaluation and experimentation to complement CAD work.
Built a functional steel prototype when the intended sheet-metal version was unavailable.

Testing & validation

Conducted multiple long-duration thermal experiments and used measured data to guide design changes.

Results

Improved thermal performance by approximately 20%.
Increased manufacturing-tool capacity by approximately four times while reducing operator handling.

Challenges

Balancing motion, packaging, thermal performance, and manufacturability in a constrained product envelope.

What I learned

How closely design, prototyping, testing, and manufacturing decisions influence one another during product development.

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Images, diagrams, and prototypes

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