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Here at Xor Systems, we always encourage Work Experience placements from local schools. Jeff our Managing Director believes it's so important for students to experience the work environment when thinking about their career path. This month we welcomed Jake Ellis from the Katherine Lady Berkeley School in Gloucestershire. We thought Jake was fantastic, here's what he thought about spending a week with Xor Systems...

Monday - My first day of work experience! I was a little nervous coming into the office but the team were very welcoming. I was set to work pretty swiftly and was asked to copy the minutes from a recent meeting into a word doc. Later that day, I started soldering, wiring, and assembling the TI-RSLK robot with help from James.

Tuesday - Today I finished building the robot and installed Code Composer Studio, the associated IDE with the TI-RSLK. Turns out the instructions for the coding of the robot are perhaps the most user ‘unfriendly’ anyone has ever seen.

Wednesday - A long day of trying to reverse engineer the robot with Mihai, only to install a different, working compiler to program the robot. With Mihai’s help, I got a rough understanding of how the components are connected to the pins, and how those pins are referred to in c++. The robot now stops after one of its bump switches are activated.

Thursday - In an attempt to get all of the bump switches linked to the two motors, Jeff showed me how to get an output of serial numbers into the serial receiver. This way, we could check if the bump switches were giving correct feedback. I had uploaded the program onto the robot about three times to test that the pins were producing the expected output, before it spurred into a manic craze as soon as I had severed the USB connection, driving across the desk and crashing into the monitor. In hindsight, it was perhaps rather foolish of me not to hold the robot in the air to prevent it from doing such! I switched off the motor board to stop the robot from moving forwards but, sadly, the robot refused to do anything afterwards. Many attempts to factory reset the robot were made by Jeff and Mihai, but the instructions on how to do so were such incomprehensible gibberish (to me at least), that they only served to prolong the robot’s death. Afterwards, Jeff set me up on mBed, a simpler programming task that involved an LPC board with buttons and LED’s.

Friday - I spent the last day programming with mBed and the LPC board, and by the end of the day had made a (kind of buggy) dimmer switch. It’s been a great week in which I have learnt a lot, although I’m still miffed about the demise of the robot…… It’s been exhausting however; a work day is definitely harder than a school day so the weekend and the impending summer holidays are now more anticipated than ever. Engineering clearly offers an interesting and challenging career where you get to stay at the forefront of technology. Thanks to the fantastic team at XOR, it’s been a blast.