Day 3, Work Experience

I started off my day today as normal. Working on the blog and doing some of the physics trivia questions. John called in around 9.20 and we headed up a few floors to meet John Bird who is involved in the Electronics Department. He gave me a tour around the facilities,Showing me all the different pieces of equipment and rooms. I then went into one of the labs and got the chance to make some of my own circuit boards for an electronic dice. I got to see all the steps involved. Although i do things like this at home it was great to see it being done in large pieces of equipment and all the specialised tools. After the PCB was made I went and got all the different parts needed to make the dice. I soldered it all together and tested it over in John's office.

After that I met a guy called Eoin. He showed me FRED the robot who has all different sensors and motors. He is controlled with a laptop and even has wifi. He could sing and had cameras so he could see where he was going. FRED was also able to take photographs at the push of a button. Eoin then showed me an experiment about sound and explained how a speaker can actually be a microphone. Before we finished he showed me how he monitors the computers in his labs. He started messing with a students computer, turning off his keyboard and mouse, Very funny!!!

After lunch, John gave me an electronic bug kit to make. I went back to lab and assembled the project which would walk upto walls and would turn away if it hit something. Once the project was assembled I headed back to John's office where i got to make circuit boards using a special program on his computer. This was very enjoyable as I had not used this kind of software before and was a great way to end the day.
Back to Physics tomorrow.....