About
Phillip Castro. Mechanical engineering, Boston area. I build hardware with the planet in mind.
01 Who I Am
I'm a mechanical engineering student in the Boston area, and most of what I do lives somewhere between CAD, FEA, and rapid prototyping. I like taking a problem from a single measurement or a rough sketch all the way to a part I can hold, then reworking it over and over until it stops feeling like a prototype and starts feeling like a real product. The planet is always sitting in the back of my mind while I do it; I want the things I make to earn their place here.
02 What I Build
On-site at Dassault Systèmes I reverse-engineered a missing ULPower aircraft engine valve cover from calipers and reference photos, then handed off a CAD model that was ready for production. On my own bench I've built a Raspberry Pi laptop that took five hinge iterations before the screen sat exactly where I wanted it, run a monitor mount through eight rounds of FEA until it held a 7 kg display at a factor of safety between two and five with under 0.3 mm of movement, and put together a carbon-filter fume extractor for about five dollars that beats the commercial unit it replaced.
03 Why It Matters
The bigger thing I care about is sustainability: using AI and engineering as tools that push us toward a Type I civilization instead of away from it. My concept work is the early sketch of that idea: an AI helmet that warns riders before a hazard turns into an accident, a swarm of solar-farm drones that place and level panels without tearing up the land, an off-grid sensor anyone can read from. I lay the whole argument out 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.