Electronics Weekly
Continuing our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2024, we profile Nathan Richardson, a UKESF Scholar and a student at the University of Surrey.
Achievements
Nathan highlighted two bodies of work he had been involved with. The first at the university and the second at Infineon, in his placement year.
Firstly, for his final year project, he devised a robotic submersible at his university. Nathan explained the aim was to help ecologists collect environmental DNA. Specifically, measuring biodiversity in the lake on the Surrey campus.
The submersible involved an ethernet tether that supplied it with both power and data. Basically, it connected the submersible with an operator’s laptop on the shore.
Ethernet cables were cheap to come by, in long lengths, so were suitable for the budget constraints set by the university, he told us. This set up a peer-to-peer network between an operator’s laptop and the Raspberry Pi on the submersible.
“Using this network, I was able to establish a ‘node.js’ server on the Raspberry Pi and connect to it using my laptop as a client. From this, commands could be sent to the server using ‘socket.io’ for real-time communication and translated into various PWM signals using ‘pigpio’. These PWM signals controlled three electronic speed controllers and one waterproof servo.”
“The electronic speed controllers were used to determine the speed of 3 waterproof brushless motors attached to propellors, in turn controlling the direction of the submersible. The servo controlled a 3D printed ‘niskin bottle’, which would prime 2 bungs around a central acrylic tube, snapping shut when the servo was triggered, capturing a water sample. A live video stream was also set up between the operator’s screen and the submersible to aid driving.”
The project required Nathan to ramp up on various skills, he shared. For example, he learned about web development, from scratch, to develop the peer-to-peer network structure necessary for the project.
“I spent hours in the lab tinkering away with the shell to get it to fit together properly. Sometimes, compromises had to be made with component choice, and as such I had to design parts of the submersible to accommodate such compromises.”
He told us, having learned a lot about submersible design, that he was looking forward to making the next robot more durable, faster and, ultimately, more useful to ecologists.
Note that for this project, and other university work, he maintained a consistent first-class average.
Also, for his placement year, Nathan worked as a verification engineer at Infineon Technologies.
He told us he ramped up on SystemVerilog and UVM, learning about testbench structure and one of the designs within the Infineon ecosystem.
For example, he debugged failing tests to root cause, identifying whether there was an issue with the RTL or with the testbench model. He used ‘certitude’ to discover any faults with the checking mechanisms and fixed them accordingly.
He shared that he took responsibility for a register block within the system, developing tests to hit specific configurations of the device. Nathan also developed checkers for these tests that were then mapped to specific functional and requirements coverage items.
“Once the tests were running in our regressions, we would see the requirements satisfied on our results page, getting the project closer to tapeout.”
Finally, looking ahead, Nathan told us he had signed up for the “combat robot” project at the University of Surrey. He was to be part of a team designing an ‘advanced precision agriculture system’ for his course. He anticipated tasks at hand varying from gearbox design to calculating the power consumption of a farming robot ecosystem.
Electronics Industry ViewpointKaren Holland, CEO of XCAM, also shared her viewpoint on Nathan’s entry.
She highlighted Nathan’s capability and his very proactive work in setting up clubs, such as the Robotics club and the Coding club, as well as his extensive outreach work in STEM.
“This theme of helping others even extends to his non-STEM related youth club assistant work, indicating his genuine passion when it comes to helping others to learn and progress.”
Community
On the community and STEM outreach side of things, Nathan has been involved in a variety of activities
During his time at school, we learned, he made several efforts to boost STEM engagement. For example, he founded both the Robotics Club and the Coding Club at St Simon Stock Catholic School, the former of which he was recognised for by the University of Kent.
For the Robotics Club, members would meet every Thursday to design and construct robots for a variety of challenges. Mainly combat focused, akin to Robot Wars, he added.
“We would analyse different mechanisms and see what the best ones were for our designs. One time, we built a ‘deadly’ spinner combat robot. We found that the impacts were destroying whatever gear mechanism we had powering the spinner, and so opted to use pulleys instead. Upon impact with another robot, the belt would slip and reduce the energy transfer to the gearmotor, keeping it intact. The resulting robot remained undefeated for many fights.”
At University, Nathan continued his passion for STEM outreach. In 2021, he was awarded with a UKESF scholarship with Infineon Technologies. During this time he assisted with multiple Career’s Fairs encouraging students to study STEM, specifically electronics.
“In particular, I wanted to give back to the community that raised me, so I reached out to St Simon Stock Catholic School to attend their Career’s Fair representing the UKESF. During it, I met a younger student who used to attend the Robotics Club. He had always been interested in agriculture, but I was thrilled to hear his passion for agricultural engineering, a path that combines STEM with a field he loves. I’m now making it my mission to attend their career’s events as much as I can to show my appreciation, and to show students the possible paths put forward to them. My goal is to show as many people as I can how STEM skills link with their passions.”
On his placement year, Nathan also had the opportunity to attend a year-long after-school workshop with Infineon. Over the course of the project, this involved giving students the task of creating an autonomous remote-control car using a Raspberry Pi and computer vision libraries.
It was a great opportunity to show them the principles of decomposing a problem into a series of sub-problems, he shared. And also assigning different team members to those specific sub-problems. Concluding with a weekend-long workshop in the University of Bath, the students gained vital problem solving and teamwork skills. One student in particular seemed very keen to study engineering at its conclusion, he recounted. It also gave him multiple ideas for the future about how he would run his own STEM projects and outreach activities.
“When I returned to Infineon this year for a summer placement, I made it my mission to help others learn from my mistakes. When a new starter joined in the verification department, I used my initiative to check in regularly with him. Often when starting a new job, it can be daunting to approach senior members of staff with any queries that may seem basic. For example, on my placement year, I made the mistake of keeping problems with understanding to myself as I didn’t want to seem like a nuisance. During our chats, I broke the nature of verification down using layman’s terms and reassured him that the only bad question is one unspoken.”
Aside from STEM, Nathan has also volunteered as a youth club assistant at his local Baptist Church.
Each week this would involve would setting up and running activities for primary school aged children. Even though it’s not related to STEM, he valued this experience highly, he told us.
“It allowed me to develop my communication skills for future outreach and it was a joy to help the local community. As of the time of this submission, I have just had an interview for a part-time STEM after school club assistant role. Directed at 5–12-year-olds, I am hoping to apply my technical and communicative abilities to further engage the next generation with STEM.”
Congratulations to Nathan Richardson!
See also: Elektra Awards 2024 – The Winners
