Hello form Hanna:
"The work title 'engineer' told me very little about what was actually going on in their work place. I knew I would be working with technology and use math, but that is still a pretty abstract description. I had no idea what an engineer would actually do at work until I started at ZP.
The answer to the question: Engineers do a lot, and an engineer is not just an engineer: They come in different flavours! We have chemical, electronical, biological and mechanical engineers (to name a few). An engineer does whatever the project needs you to do. I often produce sensors, research and go to meetings with the other engineers to talk about what we have done and need to do next. One of the best things is the work environment: Everybody is curious and payed to figure stuff out!"
What our team do at work will vary depending on the projects timeline.
The Fishtag system is complex enough to include several engineering fields:
Electronics
Chemistry
Mechanics
Biology
Software
Our team is as diverse as Fishtag needs it to be. We work both in labs and in front of computers: often both.
Some of the tasks that have been done is:
-The design of the electronic system. The signal created by the chemical reaction needs to be transferred from the fish and all the way to the cloud. This include acoustic transfer through water.
-The design of enzyme cocktail. Our chemical engineer have made sure the tip of the wire sensor is coated with whichever enzyme and membrane needed to get a reaction.
Consept art of the finished system.
-Testing of different means of encapsulation have been done. This has included different casting materials, methods and moulds.
-Research on biocompatability: How does our system effect the fish? Will any of the materials be poisonous when in contact with tissue? Will the size and/or weight cause the fish difficulties?
-Make voltage changes (readings from the sensor) into an understandable graph for mortals to understand. The numbers x, y and z in voltage change alone is difficult for humans to interpret as glucose or cortisol levels. Our engineers have designed a cloud system (Djuli) which does the job at the same time as all your data is safely stored.
As you might have figured from the text above: the question "what do you do at work?" has no simple answer for engineers. The tasks are vastly different, just like our team members.
Until next time,
Hanna T. Bråthen,
Engineer at ZP
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