Hilderstone Radio Club: Projects by St Joseph’s pupils

Pupils from St Joseph's

At the first meeting of 2018 for the Hilderstone Radio Club, members were treated to an excellent presentation by three pupils from St Joseph’s Catholic Primary school.

The girls are members of the STEMettes club and the Schools Amateur Radio Club Network, based in Australia.

They demonstrated three projects they had carried out as part of an after-school coding club. Despite never having soldered before they managed to build a flashing LED Christmas tree using four transistors and capacitors.

The girls learnt how to program the Arduino microprocessor using the ‘C’ programming language. They were challenged by a school in Melbourne to draw a picture with LEDs incorporated. The flashing of the LEDs is controlled by programming the Arduino.

While awaiting to hear the result of the challenge they have been writing pen-pal letters to each other.

Finally members saw on a Raspberry Pi the greetings message that would be read by the astronauts on the International Space Station. The girls wrote the Python code which will be transmitted up next month by the European Space Agency.

The club members were most impressed with the confidence and knowledge of the girls.

If you would like to learn more about amateur radio, coding and electronics contact the Hilderstone radio club’s secretary at [email protected]