Talk

Hello everyone, Welcome my name is Paul W. I am a lecturer at the school and I work in the area of Electronics, Board level design circuits rather than power, communications.

One of the other things I do is run the electronics club, thats one of of the nicer duties as you get to help students with things they like to do.

We have an electronics club for a few reasons but one of them is that we value practical skills and we would like our students to develop practical skills while they are here. The students need a facility to do that in which is currently c34 and they need the equipment to do it but also they may need advice from our more experienced staff who try to make themselves available to advise the students on circuit design or perhaps manufacturing techniques, PCB design or software issues.

When I started in Electronics everything looked sort of like this it was all quite big and if you had a soldering iron you could do some hardware work and hopefully it would work. Along the way electronics became where many of the components were only available in these sorts of packages and formats and it became much harder for the hobbiests to do practical hardware electronics.

One consequence of that is that a lot of people have moved to software development from hardware development. so we gets lots of people coming in playing with Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos because they have that interest but this is quite inaccessible.

 So one of the things we try to do it break down that barrier a little bit by primarily giving the students advice from practical experience. Another part is providing access to the sort of stuff like this (Tagarno) so if we wanted to perhaps work on one of the components on this board we could use the microscope instead of having to use magnifying glasses