Jess - Work Experience Student 3-4-2023
Xor Systems believes in investing in people to help build our industry's future. To this end, we try and host several students every year so that they can get the experience of working in the software and engineering industry.
This week, we had Jess Butler working with us at Xor Systems. Jess is a student from Katherine Lady Berkeley (KLB) school in Wotton-under-Edge. She is a year 10 student who is studying Design Technology and Computing as two of her module options. Jeff met her when he attended a Careers Convention at the school in September 2022. She was very quick to email to ask for a work experience week, separate from the week organised by the school. She is keen to learn from a number of different companies.
Over the week, Jess completed some tasks that we set for her involving the programming of microcontrollers in the C++ and Micro python languages. She recorded her activities over the week and has shared her logs with us here:
First, I used mbed LPC1768 to control 4 LEDS in many different patterns in Keil studios while learning a new coding language.
Then I continued to use Keil studios where I used an application board attachment to the mbed lpc1768 to create different programs including using a joystick to determine which LED turns on, using the potentiometer to control the color of the RGB led, displaying a bubble level on the screen of the application board that buzzed when it went outside of the circle(when the board was not level), then I used the skills I learned to create a temperature alarm which displayed the board's temperature that was measured by the temp sensor on the board and displayed the temperature the alarm will sound at which could be changed using the potentiometer(when the alarm sounded the RGB would change from green to red and sound an alarm from the onboard speaker.
I then mbed on to the Pico w Raspberry Pi with a Pico scroll attached. The Pico scroll had a 17x7 LED display that I used to display code that I programmed in Thonny using an if statement to either display a pattern to the user or the user's name sliding across the screen by using an external library. I also programmed it so that the user could choose a coordinate for a LED of their choice to light up.
Next using the raspberry pi PicoW with a pico-OLED-1.3 attachment I created many different designs and created a program that allowed the user to select : ) or : ( using 2 different buttons that then outputted onto the shell in Thonny and calculated a percentage of happiness and sadness.
We hope Jess enjoyed her time with us and found the experience educational, and wish her luck in her studies and future endeavours.