Tim Guite

Oct 2018 - Present Diamond Light Source

Graduate Software Systems Engineer

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron. If you’re new to synchrotrons, like I used to be, they are circular particle accelerators which are carefully designed to produce extremely bright beams of light across the electromagentic spectrum, from infra-red to x-rays. This provides the basis for a wide range of research at the molecular level and below. There are many synchrotrons around the world, specialised for different applications relevant to the research done in the country. Find out more here.

I am currently working across two teams at Diamond: Beamline Controls and High Level Applications.

As a member of the Beamline Controls team, I am working to support the research activites by ensuring that motors move, detectors measure and safety systems protect, when they are needed, together. This is an incredibly complicated task, as there are millions of data points to track and provide input into. Diamond uses an open source control system for this purpose known as EPICS. Learning about the intricacies of EPICS and contributing to the global collaboration is an ongoing task for all our engineers. In July I represented Diamond at the EPICS conference at ITER, discussing our work into using web applications for display and control.

In the High Level Applications team, we work to produce software tools which can be used across a number of the systems in use at Diamond. This ranges from tools with user interfaces and interaction with our databases which are used in the control room in live operations, to supporting our underlying build infrastructure. This requires familiarity with a range of programming languages in use at Diamond - primarily Python, Java, C++ and JavaScript - and has been very interesting so far as a place for me to test my ideas and develop work to a high standard quickly.

My most recent project, which is now looking to continue and develop, has been working on a web-based user interface to EPICS which fulfills all the requirements provided by our existing tools while providing the advantages of modern web applications. Diamond is not a company which has been responsible for many web apps before so we have been working on a prototype to help us build up knowledge. We decided to base our application around the core technologies of React, Redux and TypeScript. Our project is open source so you van view our progress, and contribute, here.

This required me to quickly learn how to write in JavaScript, then TypeScript, which I did not have much experience of before, and then quickly apply it to the React/Redux framework for web applications, which I had only had explained to me at a very high level. This was quite an intense period of learning but I certainly do have a much better idea of how modern web applications are put together now! (Although some of it still seems like magic!)

Before that, I worked to implement a machine learning algorithm to aid Macomolecular Crystallography (MX) work at Diamond. The general concept it to look at data as it comes out and provide users with an idea about which experiments will yield better data. This project is documented here: https://python-topaz3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

As part of this project, I worked on the automated data analysis infrastructure, and led meetings across teams to lay out a path for the future. Here are some related links:

Key Skills

June - August 2016 University of Southampton

Internet of Things Internship

After summer of second year, I had a great opportunity to experience my university from another side, working within the Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) department at Southampton. The project involved working very independently to build on an initial concept for a weather station built around a Raspberry Pi. Alongside the product itself, a series of tutorials would be written which would allow others to very easily replicate the setup and to install the software I designed.

Within a short time scale, this involved evaluation of multiple sensors and communication systems, as well as finding a suitable open source interface and store for the weather data. Unfortunately, the main site we were hoping to use, which was hosted by the Royal Meteorological Society to aid citizen scientists, was going through some major maintenance work at the time and so was unavailable. Therefore, an open source third party solution was found. The final system also used the NMEA 0183 interface which was originally developed for GPS at sea but has now been adapted to a wide range of solutions. This would allow any future work to easily interface to the device.

Selecting the correct hardware to recommend was a real challenge. Temperature and pressure sensors are now extraordinarly cheap, but weather specific sensors vary wildy in range. Simple devices are less than £50 with a big gap to the £1000 bracket for sophisticated devices. With the aim to promote usage, the cheaper devices were recommended in the end with options in the software to interface to other hardware in the future.

In addition to the core aims of my project, I also helped out around the office with various PhD projects and experiments! This was also a great opportunity to learn about the challenges of the postgraduate life. I also learned about how to implement cloud computing principles with a Microsoft Azure workshop and helped to plan and execute sessions for the department’s yearly Smallpiece scheme, which helps young people get a head start in electronics.

Key Skills

September 2013 - September 2014, June - August 2015 Breathing Buildings

Engineering Internship

I have chose to join together two separate periods at Breathing Buildings because they followed on from each other quite naturally.

Having left school, I began a Year IN Industry (YINI) to learn what it really means to be an engineer! I was delighted to be working at a small company in Cambridge which was working to revolutionise ventilation! Having developed the system as a Professor at the local uni, our CEO was working at a governmental level to decrease the energy spent ventilating buildings in Britain, exchanging powerful air conditioning for small fans which use the natural properties of air to create appropriate indoor atmospheres. Shaun has gone on to become a director at The Royal Institution - yes, that Royal Institution.

As a new member of the Project Delivery team, my first job was to learn everything I could about the work Breathing Buildings did: products, suppliers, sales methods, controls, site work, commissioning.