The Signal.X / University of Cincinnati Co-op Program: The Co-op Perspective, Part 3

My name is Dustin Preble, I am a third year computer engineering student at the University of Cincinnati and I am on my third co-op term with Signal.X Technologies.

Working at Signal.X is an experience that I couldn’t be more thankful for. Just the amount of knowledge I’ve acquired since the day I first walked into Signal.X until today is more than I could have ever imagined I would receive. Here are my experiences working for Signal.X and living in Michigan.

Starting from my first day in January of 2015 I have been learning how to program in LabVIEW. The LabVIEW learning process is still going on today as it takes many years to master it. For my first semester I worked almost exclusively with LabVIEW, but in various scenarios, most of which incorporated different types of hardware. It was some time later in my first co-op term that the people here at Signal.X realized that I work very well with my hands and have a decent mind for mechanical work, even though I am a computer engineering major. So when I came back for my second term, in August of 2015, I began working mostly with electrical panels, this included working with them from scratch and installing all the ducting, railing, and hardware that would be required for the specific project, and also wiring all the components. Now I am in my third term here at Signal.X. When this term started I was working mainly on the prototype casing of a product in development. From there I went on to working on a cabinet build. For this build I ordered all of the parts, did all of the constructing of the actual cabinet and even helped teach our newest co-op how to build and wire the subpanel of this cabinet. Since then I have been mostly working on the construction of our new workshop. I’ve been the guy that has put all our new tables and tools together.

Work lasts for eight hours a day so that leaves me with a good amount of time outside of work to do whatever I like. However the city of Northville, in all of its beauty, is rather boring for someone my age. The city is mostly populated with very wealthy older people and because of this the nightlife around Northville mostly consists of restaurants and bars, so on weeknights I usually just play video games in the condo. However, on the weekends I usually just go home and hang out with friends from high school since I grew up in Toledo, Ohio which is only an hour drive from Northville.