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Tom, currently a student at Katharine Lady Berkeley School (KLB) in Wotton under Edge, joined us for a week in July.

Monday - I was very nervous on my first day. I didn't know what to expect. My nerves quickly settled after I met the team and had a tour around the Science Park with Jeff. I was quickly set to work and given a Mbed NXP Lpc1768 with tasks to complete throughout the day. These tasks ranged from turning on a LED, to making LEDS blink and to use two buttons to turn on and off the LEDS. Next I was set my final task for the day and that was to make the LEDS brightness change by changing the time that the LEDS are on and off. I tried to add two buttons (one to increase the on time of the LEDS and one to decrease) however I struggled.

Tuesday - When I got in the office it was straight to work. I figured out how to make the buttons work on my LED dimmer and it turned out you had to debounce them. We then got the oscilloscope out and plugged it to the board which showed the voltage waves when you made the LEDS brighter and darker. I was given a Mbed Application Board which had pins that you fitted into the Mbed NXP Lpc1768. The board had a joystick, lcd, accelerometer, temperature sensor, rgb, speaker and potentiometers. I was asked to use the potentiometers to mix two colours together on the rgb and to make the joystick light up the LEDS as well as to display something on the LCD. I was then asked to display the accelerometer readings on the LCD, I ran into a few errors whilst trying to compile the code but with help we quickly sorted it out.

Wednesday - I continued from where I left off yesterday, and was asked by Jeff to add the temperature to the LCD as well as the accelerometer readings. Later on in the morning, I sat in on a meeting which was interesting. After lunch I was given a PySense board which I had to setup. I only got so far into the setup because I found it too hard and I didn’t want to damage the board or the computer, so I asked to move onto something else. Jeff gave me the U-blox C027 and told me I would be using it the next day, so I added the board to my compiler for preparations.

Thursday - This morning, I continued to use the U-blox C027. It took some time to get familiar with the pin numbers and where everything is on the board. I started to make the U-blox C027 talk to the computer by using a USB virtual comm port and PuTTY. I sent the temperature and accelerometer readings, as well as the position of the joystick and the state of the rgb (the colour) and LEDS (whether it’s on or off) to the computer, and also managed to make the speaker sound a series of beeps. I finished this off later in the day, as I joined the team in another meeting, which was fun.

Friday - My final day of work experience, what a week it has been. It’s been very challenging but also very interesting. Before I came to Xors I knew next to nothing about C but now I know quite a bit. Today I finished off the series of beeps. I was asked to send the longitude and latitude coordinates to PuTTY by using the GPS/GNSS. I couldn’t get my head around on how to code this in the compiler so I spent quite a bit of time looking at example projects. I imported a example project and built off that. In PuTTY it displayed the time, longitude and latitude, when we searched on Google maps, it was only off by two meters.