Now in its seventh year of awards, EW BrightSparks sees Electronics Weekly highlight and celebrate some of the brightest and most talented young engineers in the UK today.

EW BrightSparks 2024 profile: Nathan Richardson

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.

EW BrightSparks 2024 profile: Nathan Richardson University of SurreyFirstly, 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.