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Rocco Gibbons - Work Experience 22-11-2023

This week at Xor, we have had Rocco Gibbons with us for 5 days of work experience. Rocco studies computer science triple science and further maths for his GCSE selected subjects at Sir Bernard Lovell Academy, in South Gloucestershire.

Xor Systems makes a point of taking on several students each year for work experience as we believe in investing in the future of our industry. During this week, we ran through a series of activities that will introduce Rocco to the concepts of embedded systems.

Over his week with us, Rocco detailed the activities that he found particularly interesting in his notes which are presented below.

Day1:

-Programmed an MBED board using C++ -> made LED flash
-> made 4 separate LEDs flash in a sequence
-> made LED turn on/off through external button
-> started on RGB LED

Day2:

-finished RGB LED from previous day
->made it cycle through all colours
->used a spectrometer to look at light waves emitted

-Programmed LCD board/screen lpc1768
->displayed text and shapes ->displayed sine wave
->able to change amplitude and frequency using the two potentiometers

Day3:

-used LCD screen and accelerometer to calculate what way the board was rotated and make a ball on the screen fall that way
-started using an Arduino to control the movements of a 'carriage' on an axis.
-made it change speeds acceleration and directions
-looked at the output through an oscilloscope, produced 2 square waves

Day4:

-Programmed it to loop 1cm in each direction every 30secs
-made a program that calculated how far and in what direction it moved

Day5:

-changed the program to include interrupts
-started working on a new board (u blox C027) which has a GPS in it