• Question: what is the hardest thing you have had to fix.

    Asked by JJ to Camilla, Dan, Katie, Mike, Rhys on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Katie Sparks

      Katie Sparks answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I was building a computer model of a spacecraft and trying to get results from it, everything was going well, only when the results came out none of them made sense and were backwards to what we had expected. It was difficult trying to think up all the different things to check to find anything and everything that might be wrong in my model.
      We got some good results out in the end though.

    • Photo: Mike Lawton

      Mike Lawton answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I once had to fix a broken down coach in Germany! I was actually on my way to get married in the Czech Republic when the coach ground to a halt. The drivers weren’t mechanics and it turned out there was a problem with the breakdown service – it couldn’t come for another 12hrs, meaning I miss my big day. So working with the rather poor tool set on the coach, I worked out which part had failed, came up with a work around and the coach limped into Prague some 5hrs late. I did get a round of applause from the other passengers which made me feel like an engineering star!

    • Photo: Camilla Weiss

      Camilla Weiss answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      Debugging electronics can get tricky. Most of our electronics are digital so everything is 1’s and 0’s – we use these 1’s and 0’s as a language which can be read using special instruments like oscilloscopes and logic analysers. I’ve had an issue where I was getting results which made no sense but pointed to a likely component on the board. It took a good couple of days to single out one particular signal which was switching around a 1 and a 0 in a very long sting of the numbers. The problem was it was the result of two failed components, not just one, so it was a frustrating puzzle to solve but very satisfying when I got to the bottom of it!

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