About
Phillip Castro — Mechanical Engineering · Boston Area. I build hardware that respects the planet it's built for.
01 Who I Am
I'm a mechanical engineering student based in the Boston area, building hardware that respects the planet it's built for. Most of my hands-on work lives at the intersection of CAD, FEA, and rapid prototyping — taking a problem from a measurement or a sketch all the way to a part you can hold, then iterating until it stops being a prototype and starts being a product.
02 What I Build
On-site at Dassault Systèmes I reverse-engineered a missing ULPower aircraft engine valve cover from calipers and reference photos, delivering a CAD model ready for production. On my own bench I've designed a Raspberry Pi laptop through five hinge iterations until the screen sat exactly where I wanted it, simulated a monitor mount in FEA across eight iterations until it carried a 7 kg display at a factor of safety between two and five with under 0.3 mm of displacement, and built a carbon-filter fume extractor for about five dollars that outperforms the commercial unit it replaced.
03 Why It Matters
The longer arc I care about is sustainability — using AI and engineering as instruments toward a Type I civilization rather than against it. My concept work (an AI-powered motorcycle helmet that warns riders before hazards become accidents, swarm solar-farm drones that place and level panels with minimal environmental footprint, an off-grid public environmental sensor) is the early sketch of that thesis. The full argument is on the Vision page.
04 Skills & Tools
- CAD SolidWorks, Fusion 360
- Simulation SolidWorks Simulation (static FEA), iteration-driven design optimization
- Prototyping FDM 3D printing on Ender 3 V2 Neo · PLA+ · PETG · carbon-blend filaments
- Electronics Arduino, Raspberry Pi, soldering, multimeter debugging, circuit prototyping
- Process reverse engineering from physical references, FEA-led material removal, hands-on assembly
05 How I Use AI
As a collaborator, not a cheat code. I treat it the way I treat a powerful machine on the shop floor: useful when it's pointed at the right problem, dangerous when you stop thinking. The reasoning is in the essay.
06 Get In Touch
Open to internships, co-ops, and conversations about hardware that earns its place on the planet.