ChargePoint
ChargePoint Projects Vulcan and BOROS: Test Automation
This was the first year ChargePoint, a leader in the electrical vehicle (EV) charging industry, partnered with the Baskin School of Engineering Corporate Sponsored Senior Projects Program (CSSPP). With over 255,000 active charging ports under management and 532,000 roaming ports globally, ChargePoint is consistently developing and enhancing their electrical vehicle charging technology to keep up with customer demand.
To support the development of new features to improve and streamline the testing of their products, ChargePoint sought out the innovation of several Baskin School of Engineering students. They sponsored two student projects during the 2022–23 academic year, Project Vulcan and Project BOROS: Test Automation, both aiming to solve pain points in ChargePoint’s current testing processes.
Project Vulcan
Project Vulcan addressed the labor cost and time spent to fix EV charging hardware component defects in the field by creating a thermal camera-based system that can help testing engineers catch and fix manufacturing defects while still in the factory.
The team of five, which included students Bayley Barreuther, Kyle Lim, Jonathan Aguirre, Troy Schultz, and Gavriel Beniyaminov, were given thermal cameras, laptops, and access to a variety of ChargePoint’s software and hardware testing tools in order to develop their technological solution.
Using a combination of web applications, thermal imaging, computer vision technology, and programming languages, Team Vulcan created a robust hardware component testing system capable of minimizing on-site hardware failure and increasing customer safety and product reliability.
“It drives you to know that your work has worth, and you're not just doing it to do it,” said Vulcan team member Bayley Barreuther. “ChargePoint gave us a project that had the potential to be very beneficial in their testing platforms, so that’s what kept us motivated and was a big driving factor in the success of our project.”
Their innovative system was accepted by the ChargePoint team. As a current ChargePoint intern, Barreuther is continuing his work on Project Vulcan to help get the new system integrated into ChargePoint's hardware testing frameworks.
When asked about his overall experience being a part of the CSSPP, Barreuther said, “I had a super positive experience working with all of my team members and our ChargePoint sponsors. Our team had great communication and we brought together a lot of different strengths, and ChargePoint’s support, resources, and on-site visit opportunities allowed us to make swift progress on Vulcan and succeed.”
In addition to Barreuther, team member Gavriel Beniyaminov was also offered a full-time paid internship with ChargePoint this summer. He is currently working on a separate project.
“It was a fulfilling and rewarding experience working with the Vulcan team,” said Adam Glueck, ChargePoint test engineer. “They brought great energy and enthusiasm for learning and exploring the interdisciplinary side of the project, collaborating with mechanical, electrical, and software engineers. I felt like we were able to collaborate, communicate, and bring a new idea from concept phase to a polished and integrated execution with an aggressive timeline.”
BOROS: Test Automation
Project BOROS focused on creating an internal tool that can prevent testing issues arising when new software changes are deployed as well as reduce the number of manual steps and human input needed in current ChargePoint software testing processes.
Using a pipeline tool known as Jenkins, Team BOROS developed a framework to help automate and validate test system software and provide ChargePoint’s testing team an opportunity to better visualize their test data.
Their framework, which is planned to extend into ChargePoint’s EV charging device testing products in the future, can help increase the efficiency of running and interpreting a large number of mandatory factory tests.
“Taking the CSE 115 series was one of the best decisions I’ve made at UC Santa Cruz,” BOROS team member Tanmay Mittal said. “It was really nice to get a taste of what the professional world was like. Also, the level of collaboration and communication required for Project BOROS was a great learning experience, and I gained a lot of skills that I can take to future projects and industry.”
In addition to Mittal, Team BOROS included engineering students Adam Barness, Esther Chung, Henry Estberg, Parhuam Jalalian, and Jackson Tran, supported by ChargePoint industry professionals Sierra Catelani and L Lin.
Barness was offered a full-time paid internship with ChargePoint this summer, where he is continuing the work of BOROS.
“The students from CSSPP brought exactly the energy we needed to prototype and deploy these new capabilities,” said L Lin, ChargePoint test engineering director. “My experience here was that their passion and collaborative attitude inspired the rest of my team to go above and beyond to ensure their deliverables were successful.”
Project Vulcan team
Project BOROS: Test Automation team