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Diary of a Trainee Electronics Engineer: July 2016

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New projects, preparing for Wuthering Bytes and planning for the future.

Earlier in the year I thought that over the summer I may have been less busy once I had finished the first year of my HND, however, it's been quite the opposite. At the beginning of the month I managed to cram in some relaxation time and book a very last minute week away to Majorca! I know I’ve already been away this year, but there’s something appealing about being able to sit in the sun abroad instead of an office in dreary Yorkshire!

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Projects

It's been quite some time since I last got hands on with something new that is Arduino based. This month I assembled the TinkerKit Braccio Robot Arm and tested this with some of the example sketches. I had a couple of issues with aligning the servo motors, so had to tweak the code to make the angle of one of the servo motors more acute to stop this getting caught when it moved. I'm really looking forward to learning more about the movement and control of the arm. Hopefully I will then be able to create a sketch which enables the arm to make a sequence of chosen movements, before I look at how to integrate a remote control with the arm. Before I do this I will first study the libraries and functions more in depth, so I know exactly how the arm is working before I make any significant changes to any of the examples.

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Another project which is currently under way is building and using the RC2014 'Full Monty' kit. Essentially this is a 1980s style modular computer which uses a Z80 processor and is assembled on a base board with individual PCBs for the RAM, ROM, serial I/O and clock etc. When I first received this kit I got really excited to see the individual components of a computer in more detail and to be able to study the workings of how each subsystem is interconnected. I look forward to learning more about the various modules of the RC2014 and gaining a much better understanding of how a computer works.

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To accompany the RC2014 full Monty kit I additionally bought the universal micro keyboard and one of the first things I noticed was that this uses an ATMEGA328, so I was curious how this would work without a multiplexer considering the number of inputs this particular microcontroller has. From this I began looking at keyboard multiplexing and how this works, which I found very interesting and look forward to exploring in more detail.

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Preparing for Wuthering Bytes

I've been helping out with the PR side of things for this year's upcoming Wuthering Bytes! As the technology festival is fast approaching I’ve been trying to encourage more young people and students to attend the even and see what it's all about! For anyone who's thinking about coming along, I couldn’t recommend it enough! I'll be running a soldering workshop there for the third year running and there are loads of cool talks and workshops happening too, tickets are available here and more information can be found at wutheringbytes.com.

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I'm also in the process of assembling one of the kits which will be given out at the festival this year and can be assembled in the soldering workshop run by myself. I think this is possibly the coolest Wuthering Bytes kit to date!

Signing up to STEM

Last month I mentioned that I signed up to be a STEM ambassador and why I wanted to do this. At the back end of July I had my induction session at the new Laidlaw Library of Leeds University, where I met other people who had signed up to become STEM ambassadors and we had an introduction to the different kinds of things which are expected of you as an ambassador. I can't wait to get started and go into schools to volunteer with STEM activities!

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Since the start of another academic year is fast approaching and I’m going into the final year of my HND, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about my next steps and where I want to apply to university to top up my HND to a Bachelors degree and what course I want to study. So far my serious considerations are Leeds university for Medical Engineering and then either Leeds or Huddersfield for Electronic Engineering. At this moment in time I’m really interested in medical engineering because of the breakthrough in technologies and how they are changing peoples lives; take Organovo for example, this is a company which specialises in bioprinting functional human tissue, something which I find fascinating and is the sort of research/industry I would love to be a part of once I’m fully qualified.

Trainee Electronics Engineer, currently studying towards my degree in Electronic Engineering at the University of Hudderfsield. Completed my HND in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Bradford College 2017. Love to try new things and build interesting projects!
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