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Diary of a Trainee Electronics Engineer: A Look Back at 2016

Around a year ago I wrote about my 2015 highlights, this included the wide variety of things I had learned over that year as well as the new platforms I had worked with. I thought it would be nice to do the same again for 2016 and look at how much things have changed since then.

From starting the second year of my HND to working with new hardware platforms, I didn’t quite realise how busy the past year has been until I put it down on paper.

RC2014

In my first post on RC2014 – a retro Z80 based modular computer – entitled, RC2014 Modular Computing, I took a look at the various modules included in the kit. These included the CPU, RAM and ROM etc. which are inserted into a backplane. The completed retro computer can then be programmed using BASIC. The thing that is really cool about this kit is that it takes you back to the very basics, by building essentially what is a 1980's micro-computer.

I had a couple of issues with my RC2014 and for one reason and another I couldn’t seem to get it working. I tried numerous things to determine why my completed RC2014 wasn’t working and this was covered in the post Assembling & Debugging RC2014. It wasn’t until my third post that I finally had a working computer and was able to begin learning to program in BASIC, details of which can be found in the post, Further Debugging RC2014 and First Programmes.

There was quite a lot of debugging to be done with this project and it took me some time to really get my head around the building blocks, although in the end I got there. It may have taken a little longer than I anticipated, but I’m looking forward to future RC2014 projects.

Wuthering Bytes 2016

I volunteered at Wuthering Bytes for the 4th year running and hosted my 3rd soldering workshop. This year I felt like I understood more of the talks than ever, even if there are still areas I don’t fully understand. It would be near impossible for me to pick just one favourite talk from the whole of Wuthering Bytes, so instead I picked one from the Festival Day and another from the Saturday of OSHCamp:

What does Mass Spectrometry have to do with me – Giles Edwards

This was my favourite talk from the Festival Day. Here we were first given a quick run through of the relevant chemistry, before Giles explained how a mass spectrometer works. This was followed by example uses in everyday life. This includes neonatal, drug, security and food screening as well as for carbon dating. I loved the fact that this talk was mainly about chemistry, but that it made me want to know more about the electronics of a mass spectrometer.

Making the Laser Light Synths – Seb Lee-Delisle

In this talk, which was held on the Saturday of OSHCamp, Seb walked us through his journey of Making the Laser Light Synths. These are musical instruments covered in thousands of super bright LEDs, which are used in large outdoor installations along with high power lasers, and allow members of the audience to perform.

Soldering Workshop

Each year the soldering workshop gets progressively busier, this year more than ever. I thought this years kit which was assembled at the soldering workshop was particularly cool too. This was a random number generator kit which uses noise to produce true random numbers. To read more about this please read the post on Assembling the OSHCamp 2016 Kit.

GNU Tools Cauldron

I’d been asked to help out as crew at the GNU Tools Cauldron, which this year ran as part of the Wuthering Bytes festival. I wasn’t too sure what GNU Tools were, so I had a bit of reading up to do. At this I also ran a second soldering workshop on the Sunday, for anyone from the Cauldron who wanted to assemble the GNU LittleWire kit which delegates received. You can find out more about GNU Tools here in the post Diary of a Trainee Electronics Engineer: September 2016.

Media

Towards the beginning of the year 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.

To celebrate National Women in Engineering Day 2016 I took part in the RS Voices: Women in Engineering video filming at the beginning of June, which was then released on June 23rd (NWED). I travelled down to London for the day, where I met the film crew and interviewer from RS Components at Fab Lab London. I love taking part in events such as this, especially when you get the opportunity to meet and interact with other engineers, such as Dr. Lucy Rogers and Zixuan Wang, as well as data scientists like Ruby Childs!

At the beginning of August I was featured in a video called Engineer of Tomorrow. Here I spoke about my journey so far and how I got to where I currently am, as well as what it’s like to be a trainee electronics engineer. This also included my favourite modules to date from my HND, how this links to my work, as well as the perspective which engineering gives me on life. To see the full article and video please visit the post by Greig from RS.

I particularly enjoy taking part in videos like these as I feel they’re easier to get across to the younger generation and will hopefully inspire more young women to persue a career in STEM subjects.

BCS Student Competition

Towards the end of this year I entered the BCS OSSG student competition with The Light Theremin Project and was extremely surprised to find out I had won in the category for Best Apprentice Project. So in mid October I went down to the BCS offices in London to give a presentation. I was quite nervous to say the least. However, it was a fantastic experience and it was great to hear about what projects other people around my age were working on.

Once again I would like to congratulate Dan Gorringe who won the category Best School Project with The Next Generation of Open Source Engineers, and also Luke Robert who won the category Best First Year Project with The use of Open Source projects to scaffold the development of new programmers.

I’ve worked on so many cool and exciting projects this year it’s hard to keep track, but of course I’ve been keeping a diary. Below are some quick links to this year’s posts for anyone who wants to read about other projects I’ve worked on and things I’ve learned.

Another Year

I’m excited to see what 2017 brings, I am looking to complete my HND in the middle of the year and hopefully I will be able to begin a top up in the autumn which means I can turn this into a bachelors degree.

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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