Student story - Ben Gray
Ben Gray is now back in the department completing his MEng degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering but last year he put his studies to the test.
He spent his placement year with Siemens Transportation Systems in Ashby where he was part of a team of engineers developing a new Human Machine Interface (HMI) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for the Victoria Line Management System Project.
The Victoria Line on London’s busy Underground has CCTV installations, along with other systems, controlled and managed by Siemens. Getting the HMI in the system right is a critical part of ensuring security and safety.
Ben worked on the functionality for the playback of CCTV Recordings, in particular stopping multiple users clashing when requests were made from the recorder. He drew mimics of the exterior maps for the stations on the line to allow the operators to quickly direct emergency services to the entry points of the station. When the hardware arrived for the Victoria Line system he took part in the configuration and set up of a domain server and a set of clients PCs for the training simulator. This simulator is now used to train operators to work in the control rooms.
He was also involved with Factory Acceptance Testing which included component testing for the CCTV systems, PA Systems and setting up workstations for running simulation software representing exterior system entities that will be present on installation, - all part of a real day job.
Outside of the project, in the development department at Siemens Transportation, Ben used his degree knowledge to assess the feasibility of increasing the operating temperature range of the company’s Fastflex range. Second year principals like thermal resistance and power dissipation came in useful when trying to adapt the power supply to meet I/O requirements.
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