During a 6-week internship at ideaForge, India’s pioneer in indigenous UAV development for surveillance, reconnaissance, and industrial applications, I joined a team building an Engineering Validation Prototype (EVP) for one of their subsystems. While the specifics of the subsystem remain confidential, the experience gave me hands-on exposure to how a hardware product actually comes together, from a CAD model to a working, testable prototype.
My work spanned the full mechanical-to-electrical pipeline: I built the CAD model in Fusion 360, then took it from screen to reality by fabricating and assembling the physical parts myself. This included designing components for 3D printing and CNC milling, two very different fabrication constraints that taught me to think about manufacturability, not just geometry, from the earliest design stages. Alongside the mechanical build, I also designed the electronics setup needed to drive the assembly, connecting the mechanical and electrical halves of the subsystem into one working unit.
Beyond the hands-on build work, this internship gave me my first real look at how hardware products move through a structured development lifecycle, from Engineering Validation Prototype (EVP), through Design Validation Prototype (DVP), to full production. Understanding that progression early on shaped how I’ve approached every hardware project since.