Dylan - Work Experience Student 12-5-2024
Every summer, we at Xor Systems endeavour to give Work Experience placements to local students interested in embedded systems, IoT, and computer science. We do this to encourage young people to pursue careers in STEM, and to help foster an interest in embedded systems.
This week, we have had Dylan join us from Cotham School in central Bristol. Dylan is a year 10 student and has an interest in computer science. He is also studying History and French along with other subjects for his GCSEs. Dylan contacted us in February in order to arrange his placement with a firm in the Bristol area as part of his school's work experience program. When he arrived, he had good knowledge of Python programming and general Computer Science topics, but had no experience with embedded systems or C/C++.
On Monday, after a tour of the building and a chat about our projects, and what he wanted to get out of the placement, Dylan was introduced to our selection of MBed development boards. MBed is a fantastic way to familiarise oneself with embedded development, as it is an entire development environment and can take you from your first blinking LED to creating a fully blown system with an RTOS and network stack.
Dylan quickly mastered the simple parts of MBed (GPIO, PWM, etc.) and by Tuesday he was writing programs to print sensor data onto a small LCD screen on the board. After he had developed a Snake game on the LCD screen - including an animation for when the player dies - we decided we'd give him something a bit more challenging. We asked him to set up a TCP server on a host computer using Python, and then pipe the data from the development board's accelerometer and temperature sensor over a socket to the host machine, and then graph it.
Dylan worked on this for the rest of the week, and eventually (after grappling with some dependency issues) he got it working. The live graphing took some effort, and after exploring some multithreading techniques he decided it would be easier to do the whole thing in one thread with some optimisations.
Overall, Dylan was great to have for the week and was a testament to himself and his school. He had this to say about his week with us:
"In my week at xor systems, on year 10 work experience, I had to solve challenges based on embedded systems. I really enjoyed this, and I think that it has really helped me understand what I want from a job. During this week I have learnt the basics of a new coding language (C++), and I think that the environment I was in really helped me to learn this. I would definitely recommend this to other people, as it has been a great experience for me, and has helped me to gain new skills and confidence for work."
Thanks Dylan, and good luck with your studies!