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In the month of July, Xor Systems aims to host several work experience students. We at Xor Systems believe strongly in working with young people, to foster future careers in STEM and inspire the next generation of engineering talent.

This week we were joined by Thomas, a student from St Mary Redcliffe school, who is taking computer science, triple science and product design as his GCSE options. He has previous experience of programming an ESP32 microcontroller with micro python. Over this past week, we have expanded on this knowledge base by introducing Thomas to the C programming language and two more microcontroller boards. We also introduced Thomas to the m-bed IDE. This is a program designed to aid in the writing of code for various microcontrollers.

The following account is in Thomas's own words :

The first activity that I was tasked with was controlling a series of LEDs on a development board. Initially, I programmed the LEDs to flash in specific patterns. Then I used PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to vary their brightness. The PWM code was then reapplied to an RGB LED which allowed me to program the LED to display any colour.

I then used one of Xor's spectrometers to analyse the light coming from the LED when set to different colours and noting the peaks produced and their corresponding wavelengths when different colours were produced.

Next, I was tasked with setting up and using a series of sensors.

Firstly I set up an accelerometer, this is a sensor that can measure the acceleration affecting it in 3 axis; X, Y and Z. Once the sensor was working. I used it to send commands to the computer that moved the mouse depending on the orientation of the module.

Then I setup and calibrated a temperature sensor to give readings on ambient air temperature and alter the colour of the RGB LED according to the measured temperature.

In the last two days, I started to work with a Rasberry Pi Pico in micro python. My objectives with this microcontroller were to control a stepper motor over GPIO and then UART. Then, to test the Raspberry Pi Pico Wi-Fi functionality by reading and writing data to a web page.

Finally, these last two tasks were combined so that I could send commands to the stepper motor through the web page.

Highlights of the week:

One highlight of the week was using one of Xor Systems’ weather stations on the roof of the Bristol and Bath Science Park. We were able to keep tabs of the weather scorching the country from the comfort of our air conditioned office.

Another was using some of the tools to analyse the work that was done, such as analysing the shape of the waveform used for PWM control using an oscilloscope, or using a spectrometer to quantify the wavelengths of light coming from an RGB led when displaying different colours.

We hope that this account of Thomas’s week at Xor proved interesting, and if you yourself might be interested in applying for work experience at Xor Systems, we encourage you to go to the Contact page of our website and send over your CV.