Jamon is on Placement Again!

[jamonwindeyer]

Good morning!

6:48am is probably the earliest I've ever posted on the forums today I'm starting another new Engineering placement! This one is with Cochlear, the company that designs and manufactures the Cochlear implant. Super, super exciting I'm living back at home for this one, but I'll be battling with Sydney's public transport for two hours either way. Lucky me

As with my previous journal, this will be a spot to share little pieces of what I'm up to. It will help me with my end-of-placement presentation, and offer a bit of an insight into Electrical Engineering (whether you want to study it in the future or just need a way to procrastinate )

[Joseph41]

How's it going so far, J?

[jamonwindeyer]

How's it going so far, J?

Really well thanks mate! Haven't been updating although I've meant to, not for lack of time but because I'm now thinking weekly would be too frequent for the journal for this specific placement. However...

[jamonwindeyer]

Month #1

So I've decided this is going to be a monthly journal, because the projects I am working on are big and I think weekly updates would get a bit boring.

I started at Cochlear a month ago, and it's been a crazy cool few weeks! I thought in this entry I'd give a bit of insight into the team I'm working with and the project I've been working on.

Before I do that, for those who don't know what a Cochlear implant is - It's a device that aims to do the job of the inner ear for someone with damage to that part of the ear. The cochlea is the thing in your ear that converts vibrations into electrical nerve impulses - If it is damaged, that impacts your hearing. A cochlear implant aims to do that job for you. The way it works, in super basic terms, is that sound is detected by microphones and processed. That encoded sound is transmitted through the skull to the implant, where it is converted into electrical signals 'detectable' by the brain.

So, I'm working with the Firmware Team. What is firmware? Well it is sort of in the name - It isn't hardware, and it isn't software. It's sort of the thing bridging the two! I'm working with the team who write the code that gets loaded into the sound processors, and handles stuff like processing/cleaning up the sounds, transmitting them to the implant, and handling other things like connections to accessories, power, etc.

My first project, however, has been more of a support project. I'm upgrading a tool used by the firmware team to automate a lot of their version control and testing (there is a lot of testing, as you can imagine). This has meant fixing broken features and adding new ones. I've been coding primarily in Python (yaaaas), with a bit of HTML as well to work with a web interface.

What I've primarily taken away from this first month is, I think, just the experience of actually working in a programming team. Team leads have been wonderful in letting me into scrums and planning meetings, and I've been meeting with my supervisor fairly.often so he can give me extra bits of info on interesting little parts of how everything works. It's a really self driven process, which I like - I enjoy being given a big task and just being left to decide my own way to approach it.

Really loving it so far

[Bri MT]

Any updates for us? 
Has the team dynamic changed much?