EESW Project

During my time studying a BTEC in electronic engineering at Coleg Menai I was given the opportunity to take part in the "EESW project" competition, where me and a few of my classmates would work together in collaboration with a local company to produce a technical project.

We were assigned to work with PAWB and the late great Ray Davies.

Ray Davies

The Photonics Academy of Wales at Bangor (PAWB) was based in Bangor University's electronics department and ran by Ray Davies mostly as a solo act. Ray used the subject of photonics to catch the attention of and inspire young students into STEM careers through the use of short courses and summer schools. The key aspect was that the designs were the work of the children and this typified Ray’s approach when working with all age groups. He would initially introduce a concept or a property of light and then ask his audience to use that aspect of light to devise a novel device or system of societal benefit. Ray described photonics as "the science of harnessing technology through light" a much broader interpretation than most.

Ray was my first mentor who I truly felt supported by and that showed me what I could make of myself if applied correctly, and for that I will always be grateful to him. I would also be remiss if I did not mention his wonderfully eccentric character, somehow the most serious and playful voice in the laboratory and his propensity for backronyms. He also left me with an uncontrollable habit of capitalizing random words.

PAWB project

For my groups project, we settled on a reasonably simple design, employing polarized light via Malus law as a mechanism for selecting musical notes to be played. Our device, that we nicknamed the "octapus" (it played eight notes) was operated by moving a mechanical slide that rotated one one of a pair of polaroid filters which had a coherent laser beam passing through them into a photodiode, by this action the change in intensity of light was able to be mapped to different musical notes.

For this project, my teammates worked on the mechanical slide mechanism and I worked on the electronics, taking simple circuit diagrams provided by Ray and chaining them together to properly interpret the light from the photodiode and to produce musical notes. As part of this project we had to employ a lot of newly developed skills, from logic gates to oscilloscopes.

In the end I think we did pretty well, having won Best solution to the project set and Best display of technology as well as runner up for Best written report and from here I was made runner up for EESW best young engineer of the year.

We also as winners of the local wales competition got to move on to the national competition at the big bang fair at the NEC in Birmingham in 2017, sadly the other projects there that year where much more impressive than our own, but it was a good experience, and certainly contributed to the sense of achievement in our young selves.

If you're truly interested in reading the full report on a project some student made in 2016 (or seeing an embarrassing old photo), you can find that here.

Summer school

Following on from the EESW project, I stayed on to attend the 2016 PAWB photonics summer school, an intensive four week course where each student got to develop a variety of electronics skills and physics knowledge by producing our own complete bespoke project.

For my project, I settled on trying to use polarized light and a unique property ray discovered of a non dispersive amici roof prism, the science of which was slightly beyond me, but the application was actually fairly simple. Put simply the prism had a split down the center that light on either side was polarized at right angles to each other, hence by attaching a polarizing filter and measuring the change in intensity of light on either side, we were able to digitize a compass bearing.

Although the concept was relatively simple, the fine detail engineering proved to be more difficult, having issues with laser beam alignment and circuit sensitivity to noise and I was sadly not able to finish my project in the 4 week duration of the summer school. I continued to work on my project off and on for the remainder of my time at coleg menai and was also given the opportunity to mentor students in the following years summer school as well as for a Nuffield bursary short course.

In the end I was able to produce a working if finicky prototype.

Visiting Parliament

As a result of my involvement with PAWB, I was invited by Qioptiq (industry partner) to attend an all party parliamentary group meeting on the photonics industry to share with MPs my insights and experience with the industry as a student.