When I originally built the air quality monitor for my school I used the Things Network, a public LoRaWAN radio network for low power devices to send data to the internet. This year a new version of the back end came out, called The Things Stack (aka V3). As a result, they are shutting downContinue reading “Upgrading the air quality monitor”
Category Archives: Large projects
Cyberfirst Advanced
This year I was able to get onto the Cyberfirst Advanced residential course. It was held in Warwick after the Cardiff event was cancelled. I met some interesting people and learned some new skills. The course was divided between lecture time, where the two educators taught us content, and lab time, where we got toContinue reading “Cyberfirst Advanced”
CanSat competition
Over the past seven or so months I have been working in a team of four taking part in the CanSat competition. The goal of the competition is to build a simulation of a satellite within the volume of a soft drinks can. The device is then launched in a small rocket and descends withContinue reading “CanSat competition”
Designing and building an air quality monitor
Around a year ago the headmistress of the school asked if it would be possible to build a device capable of monitoring the air quality around the school in real time. The computer science teacher directed her to me and I was asked to do some research and put together a shopping list of theContinue reading “Designing and building an air quality monitor”
From Nand to Tetris: Build a Modern Computer from First Principles online course
Yesterday I completed part 1 of the “Nand to Tetris” course by Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan on Coursera. I finished all the videos and the first 5 projects during lockdown but I delayed the final project because I wanted to try and learn the basics of Java to have another language to play with.Continue reading “From Nand to Tetris: Build a Modern Computer from First Principles online course”
Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Course
I recently finished the free online machine learning course by Stanford University professor Andrew Ng on coursera. It gives a grounding of the core concepts of machine learning such as cost functions and gradient descent and explores how different supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms such as linear regression, neural networks, support vector machines and K-meansContinue reading “Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Course”
CyberStart Essentials
For the past month or two I have been completing the 48 modules of CyberStart Essentials, part of the government’s free online extracurricular cyber security programme. Each module was made up of several sub-topics and a half hour test. They covered things such as networking, computer hardware, Windows, Linux, exploitation, forensics and much more. IContinue reading “CyberStart Essentials”
Hacking a Bigtrak with an Arduino
The Bigtrak was a programmable electric six-wheeled robot popular in the 80s. It used a keypad on top to allow the user to enter instructions, which it would then carry out sequentially. In 2010 it was relaunched. I had one of these lying around from years ago as well as a spare Arduino Mega soContinue reading “Hacking a Bigtrak with an Arduino”
Brychan Thomas' projects 