Meet Dimitrios Michalaros, a First-Year Engineering student who is just finished up his transition to major into the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Dimitrios was quick to reply with his transition to online along with his team in ENGR 133 EPICS. 

"This semester, in our EPICS project, we went through a full design process for the ScanIn system. Our team managed to complete many of the delivery requirements, designing the major parts of the hardware design and manufacturing them as well. Unfortunately, we did not manage to deliver the project due to the lab restrictions imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which did not allow our team to conduct the necessary tests in the lab for delivery. However, our transition to online-only work went very well and we managed to complete a wide range of simulations and important parts of the dFMEA document, as well as create a user guide for the RFID scanner assembly and its setup.

We cooperated really well and this brought about very positive results and the whole design and evaluation process was something I really enjoyed.

Our EPICS instructors, Venkatesh Srinivasan and Tim Strueh went above and beyond in helping us achieve success through online work, as they helped both with organization of the online version of the class and with testing.

Especially Instructor Tim, following hardware installation and setup instructions from the team members, installed the physical unit, the RFID scanner assembly, in his backyard for testing and managed to make it operational after a long pause of lab operations. This helped the team proceed with troubleshooting and refinement of final details for the design. Instructor Tim also held a virtual lab workshop to teach us and other EPICS teams on the dFMEA process.

Big thanks to both of our instructors for being so helpful and resourceful during this difficult situation."
^{Photo Credits: Dimitrios took a screenshot of his classmates and instructors during one of their virtual meetings.}