Will Ackland - Work Experience Student 2-12-2022
At Xor Systems, we are always excited about helping to get the next generation into engineering and software development. So throughout the year, we aim to host some students for work experience.
This week at Xor Systems, we had Will Ackland with us, a work experience student from Sir Bernard Lovell Academy. Will had some prior experience with writing code and we looked forward to broadening his experience this week.
We began this week by introducing Will to programming microcontrollers using an online compiler called M-bed. For his first task, we got Will to program a pattern into 4 LEDs on the microcontroller board in various patterns.
The next piece of hardware we got Will to work on was an LED matrix display. We set him two tasks to do for this. Firstly, we got him to write a program that displayed a sine wave that could have its frequency and phase altered. For the second task on this display, Will wrote a program that emulates the game snake, which he managed to do remarkably quickly. We also got Will to replicate the sine wave program on an OLED display.
Will then went back to using m-bed on another microcontroller board. This microcontroller board has a large number of components integrated into it including a display, joystick potentiometers, cellular, GPS, and ZigBee hub to name a few. Will started on this board by using the joystick and screen. He wrote a program that allowed the user to move a cursor on the screen with a joystick. Next Will used the GPS unit and was able to print off the latitude and longitude that the board was located at.
And that wrapped up Will's week at Xor. we hope he learned some useful skills from us to take to any future careers in STEM. and we look forward to working with other young people in STEM in the future.