Diary of a Trainee Electronics Engineer: April 2016

555 timers, wrapping up with HND year 1 and making a careers video

We're coming very close to wrapping up the work to complete the final term in year one of the Higher National Diploma (HND) I am currently studying towards. Since the March post I have managed to complete another unit – Combinational and Sequential Logic.

As part of the final two assignments for this module I had to work with a 555 timer. This was the first time I had used one of these ICs, despite being one of the most popular chips in the world!

Due to the end of the course quickly approaching we didn't really get the opportunity to look in great detail what a 555 timer is in lecture time for the module. I decided I would do some of my own reading and get down to the nitty-gritty of their operating principles. I also thought this would be a good opportunity to publish a post about the 555 timer IC, so I had a go at building some of the circuits in the Engineers Mini Notebook – 555 timer IC circuits by Forrest M Mims in the post, Getting to Grips with 555 Timer Basics.

Out of all the circuits from the book I decided I was going to first build the touch activated switch and then build the Toy Organ. When the Toy Organ circuit was complete I had to spend some time debugging the circuit, however, I found this an incredibly useful learning experience as not only was it an integrated circuit which I was not familiar with, but it is also a type of IC which has been recently linked to the work in my HND too.

Wrapping up with HND1

I'm also close to completing another module of my HND course, with just one more assignment to finish: Utilisation of Electrical Energy. As the little background experience I have is with electronics, I'll be honest and admit that at the beginning of this academic year I didn’t take as much of an interest in this module. However, as the year has progressed I’ve found this module more and more interesting.

Utilisation of Electrical Energy is broken down into five units;

• Transformers
• Protective Devices and Switchgear
• Lighting
• Tariffs
• Poly-phase Induction Motors

I think my favourite of the five units would have to be Protective Devices and Switchgear. I found that I enjoyed this unit more than the others, most likely due to the fact that it plays such a vital role where electrical energy is concerned; without protective devices in particular there would be a much larger threat to life. Another thing which I particularly enjoyed about this unit was learning to understand the construction and operating principles of a wide range of protective devices.

The general construction of a fuse

Source: http://eng-electric.blogspot.co.uk

Similarly, I really enjoyed learning about the construction and operating principles of the different types of luminaires whilst covering lighting, as well as using the lumen method to design a lighting plan for a room of a certain area.

The general construction of an LED

Source: spectrum.ieee.org

Filming for Careers

Since March was such a busy month, it had completely slipped my mind that towards the end of it I was visited by a small specialist publisher of careers resources, called Careersoft, to produce a short video showing what a typical day's work looks like for myself as a trainee electronics engineer. The company produces videos which are then showed in schools, colleges and career centres etc. to provide a flavour of being in the career shown.

I really enjoyed taking part in this video, I was asked lots of questions about my job and how I got into it, as well as what you typically need to obtain academically to break into the industry. Around the very back end of April I received a very exciting email to say that the raw content had been edited and that the short clip was almost complete! With any luck this will inspire some more young women to pursue engineering as a future career.