Yog - Work Experience Student 31-3-2023
At Xor Systems, we believe that investing in our industry’s future is best accomplished by investing in the people who will one day be working in it. To this end, Xor Systems takes on a number of students each year to build their experience and give them a taste of working in the engineering and technology sector.
This week we had Yog Nungra with us, a student from Broadlands Academy. He spent the week working through a series of challenges to write code to drive various pieces of hardware. While he did this, he kept a log of his activities which he has shared with us in this article:
On the first day, I was given an introduction to what the company does. After that, I was given an Mbed board, which has 4 LEDs. I programmed the LEDs to light up in specific patterns. On the second day, I was given an Mbed Application Board, which also had LEDs but many other tools such as an LCD screen, a joystick, a speaker, and an accelerometer. I downloaded a library that enabled me to program all of the different tools on it to control the LEDs and the LCD screen.
On day 3, I continued with the application board and managed to make a bubble game where the bubble needs to stay in the circle by tilting the device. The accelerometer was able to detect me tilting the device and then moving the bubble in the direction I tilted it. I also programmed the joysticks to light a different LED depending on the direction the joystick is moved. I also was able to program a potentiometer (a wheel that varies something's resistance) to adjust the volume of the speaker. I programmed the other potentiometer to adjust the color of the RGB LED.
On day 4, I was given a Raspberry Pi Pico W to program with many other accessories that you can connect to program it. However, I first had to find the libraries to program the accessories which was hard to find. I then made a program to light the OLED display and also programmed the buttons to animate different patterns on the OLED display. On day 5, I used the 8x8 LED matrix, which has around 100 small LEDs on it, to make patterns and also a game.
We hope that Yog had an enjoyable and informative and educational week with us at Xor Systems and that he is empowered to pursue a career in technology in the future.