I am an electronics engineer within Electronic Systems at PA. I’ve been on a number of projects since joining PA around 1.5 years ago, and my role on those projects has varied wildly. I started on Oakdoor, a hardware security product that we are developing in house. I was a hardware engineer on the team, designing the schematics and layout of the circuits in Altium, a PCB design tool.
The PCBs were then manufactured and I brought them up, integrating them into wider test systems and debugging problems as they arose. I then moved onto a more client facing project, which required me to gather open source intelligence on a subject before making recommendations within a report, and supporting a week long field trial. I really enjoyed getting to know the clients, supporting them on their trial and then presenting to them at the end of the project with my findings: I feel as though I’m becoming a balanced engineer who can both talk to clients and also complete and understand technical projects.
I enjoy the variety in the projects, and the availability of tools that we have in our lab! We have everything from high end Radio Frequency Network Analysers to develop communication devices to an Xray machine, which means we can always use the right tool for the job.
Every Thursday lunch within Electronics we have a ‘repair shop’ where the recent grads tear down (and sometimes put back together) electronics, to understand design decisions: from cutting costs in cheap CD players to increasing precision within medical devices. I really enjoy this time, as it not only allows me to repair some of my own devices, but is also a great opportunity to pick the brains of some of our senior design engineers.
There have been a few tight deadlines, where I’ve had to turn around a PCB, some code or some piece of work in a short space of time. I have found this both exciting and a little daunting, but have found that leaning on the experience of colleagues within PA really helps get the job done. Their experience can really cut down your timelines by days by pointing you in the right direction. These fast turn around pieces have been some of the highlights of my time at PA including using our in house small PCB mill; and getting a really senior group of clients into a room and really diving into what they really want, as opposed to what they think they want!
Just get stuck in! Even if you don’t find yourself on a project immediately, you’ll still find yourself busy either upskilling yourself in an area of interest, creating a new client demo or helping out within the capability. If you don’t know what area of electronics you want to head into when you join that’s not a problem: much like me, I simply gave a few things a go before finding one that I liked! Once you do know, if you let people know what you want to get into (whether that’s embedded firmware, hardware design, FPGAs etc) just let people know and they’ll work with you to try and upskill you in that area, maybe put you through an external course, and get you onto a project where you can put those skills to use.
