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Emily, who's currently Bristol Cathedral Choir School, studying A levels, joined us for a week. It's always exciting for us to see enthusiasm from young students, when it comes to electronics and engineering. We gave Emily a few projects to tackle during his week with us, and asked her to keep a diary of how she got on. Here's what she said....

Monday I was very nervous for the first day, however, I was immediately made to feel very welcomed by the staff. Straight into trying new things, I started off trying to make LEDs light up and then do so in a sequence. I was then tasked to use buttons attached to the board to control the order of this sequence. After this, I used the buttons to create a dimming effect in one of these LEDs by changing the on-time as it flashes undetectably fast. Then we connected it to an oscilloscope to view this change as we pressed the buttons. After this, I got to experiment with a thunderbolt board to see the cool things that can be done with these boards such as changing the RGB LED colour. Then on a new board towards the end of the day, I moved onto writing text onto a LED screen. Between playing table tennis at lunch and what I was able to achieve, I left feeling more confident and ready for the week ahead.

Tuesday Continuing where I left off yesterday, I returned to this board and used the potentiometer to adjust the colour in an RGB LED, much like the app I used yesterday, as well as making the text on the led screen move about using the joystick. Afterwards, I got to experience a meeting, which I found really interesting and insightful about working life. Then I got back to the board and tried to make the LCD screen display the temperature from the temperature sensor however I faced quite a few difficulties and so to break up the problem I explored bitmap graphics on the screen.

Wednesday With a fresh mind, I was able to get the temperature working on the screen. Moving onto another board today (ublox c027,) I started off by displaying the x y and z of the accelerometer on the LCD display. After this, I moved on to a much bigger project of making this board send its data over to a website, using an Ariel and a satellite. Whilst I was able to get most data through after some confusion, I got stuck trying to view the GPS location on the board, however my mind was quickly astray from this problem as we went to a social get together of the companies from within the building with food and drinks, as well as the opportunity to talk to others.

Thursday Today I focused on making the board share the geographical location from the GPS to the website and later to PuTTY using serials. Once we got this working we then checked how accurate it was by walking around the science park then mapping it out on a map using the coordinates collected.

Friday For my final day, I used a website called hacksplaining to learn about security and various vulnerabilities within software and how they can be prevented. Then I moved on to learning more programming with help from the staff trying challenges on a different website called codewars. After being treated to lunch and my final games of ping-pong, I left feeling more confident having had a really nice and insightful experience.