At my second co-op, piezos were used to control the position of mirrors in order to reflect lasers at precise angles. While the piezos functioned as intended at the time of installation, we weren’t sure how well they’d work over long periods of time under heavy use. To find this out, I was tasked to design and build the mechanical portion of a test fixture.

In my design, a laser diode is held by a mount and directed at a piezo/mirror combination nested inside a housing. The deflected beam would then get picked up further down its path by a position sensor. After assembling the fixture and going through a few design iterations, I had all of the components working correctly and released it so that code could be written to capture the necessary information.