Tesla Powerwall Support
Background Info
During the summer of 2016, I had an internship with Tesla Energy in Palo Alto, CA. My primary duties were to support the testing and application of a smart home battery system called the Powerwall.
Project Overview
MyM
I was introduced to many technical skills and trades required for the successful testing, application, and support of a high tech battery product.
I was exposed to and learned from many different groups within Tesla Energy from large-scale data-analytics, to product support, to system testing, validation, and integration.
My biggest role within the team focused on integration testing and validation. Tesla's battery product the Powerwall must be paired with an inverter to be used in a home. I worked to test and ensure that the battery product integrated seamlessly with other companies inverters. This primarily consisted of two roles, system level firmware regression testing and data-analytics.
I also gained experience in learning how to provide product support. The most notable two tasks were participating in an installer training video (photo on the video shooting site can be seen to the right) as well as providing phone support to field technicians. This phone support required us to gain remote access to a field technicians laptop in order to run a forced firmware upgrade on a malfunctioning unit.
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Skills Gained
My biggest skill gained during this internship was the ability to be able to switch quickly between tasks, learn a new skill, apply the skill, and obtain results and report back the information discovered.
Technical skills gained included the exposure to high tech testing environment, exposure to working with and accessing large-scale data systems, communication experience as a primary communicator with corporate partners, and team communication experience.
Lessons Learned
The biggest lesson that I learned is that in a startup-style business environment, producing results quickly and accurately is a necessity for the survival of the business.
There are many other sub-skills that are required to perform efficiently and one of the most important is communication with your team.
Although I was able to pull through and develop the results that were expected of me, one of my greatest weaknesses was communicating and asking for help from my team when I was lost on a project. The startup environment requires quick results, and one of my greatest weaknesses that i had to overcome was learning when to stop trying to solve a problem on my own, and seek outside assistance.
Learning how to interact with a team fluidly in a high-paced environment was one of the greatest skills that i gained during my time with Tesla.
