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Charlie studies at Kings of Wessex Academy in Cheddar, Somerset. The Academy is on the site of a 13th century Saxon palace, built in the time of King Alfred the Great. Charlie is interested in Computer Science and programming. While he was with us we gave him tasks centred around embedded programming, and asked him to keep a diary of how he got on. Read on to see how he found it...

I'm very grateful for the week of work experience at Xor Systems. It was a fun, challenging and interesting experience which I heavily enjoyed every minute of and provided a valuable insight into the field of work I'm already interested in.

On the first day I was given a short tour of the building and was introduced to the friendly staff working in the office. I was then given an embedded circuit board with 4 LEDs and 2 buttons which could be programmed with C++. First I was tasked to make an LED turn on and in different patterns. Next, I used the buttons to change the speed the pattern sequences moved at, which had to be debounced to increase their accuracy.

On day 2 I made the brightness of the LED change using Pulse Width Modulation and moved on to a slightly more complex board on which I changed the colour of an RGB LED periodically or with a small wheel on day 3.

On day 4 I used the small screen to display a circle, which I could move with a joystick or with the orientation of the board using an accelerometer. I also started making a snake game, although I only got the snake to move around the screen with the joystick as a single pixel.

Finally on day 5, I used another board to track longitude and latitude, and, although most of it was pasted from an example, I was able to understand the main logic of the program. I also returned to some of my previous programs to refine them and make them work slightly better. I ended the week with lots of new knowledge about computing and a programming language I had started the week knowing next to nothing about, which I am now quite familiar with.