In early June 2016 I received a forwarded e-mail in the university inbox about the BSRE, which stands for Best Student Recognition Event. I didn't know at the time what it comprises nor that I'd end up participating myself. I'm also not a best student in any way.
A quick Google search yielded a lone blog post from one of the previous runs of the event, in France, which apparently focused on fighting food waste. It also boasted ominous keywords like "networking" and "teams", which however turned out not to be so bad.
This post aims to remedy the lack of information about the BSRE and provide some info for future participants. It's something akin to a journal; keep however in mind that each run of the event is going to be very different.
It was to be the second time ever for me to fly abroad on my own, so naturally I was a bit nervous at the prospect. But when I've been offered the place, with some hesitation I decided to go. You don't get an opportunity like that every day. I wouldn't have had hesitated had I known what fun it'll be.
As it turned out, there were two of us going to represent our university, the CTU in Prague, and thus also the Czech Republic. Originally we were supposed to be three, but one couldn't go for whatever reason. The participants were from all across Europe, including Finland, Italy and Russia (though that isn't really Europe, but I suppose IBM has some business there too).
The flight from Prague to Heathrow (London) was rather uneventful. We've been treated to a small breakfast and spent most of the flight dozing off, given it took off at 6:50, so we had to get up at around 4 AM. What an unearthly hour to be awake! Sadly it was timed just right so that we would miss sunrise, yet still have to get up at such an awful hour.
The best part of the flight was the landing, where the plane made several huge circles, allowing for beautiful views of the central part of London with the iconic wheel and Tower Bridge. We then found our way through the labyrinth of the airport (or, rather, a maze; you can't get lost in a labyrinth) and spent the rest of the morning sitting on a bench at Terminal 2, waiting for our 11:30 bus (they're apparently called "coaches" here), discussing school stuff, programming languages and other usual smalltalk topics.
Somehow the bus, taking us to the IBM Hursley site, managed to be about 45 minutes late, so we departed at roughly 12:30 instead of 11:45 as planned. Naturally, while waiting, we always got all excited when a bus approached, only to have our hopes crushed again when it passed our platform!
I've spent most of the ride half asleep, as did most of the other folks. There were supposed to be around 80 students in total, though I think that's a bit generous. It took two buses, but that's mostly because some came to a Terminal 5, which is not connected to the rest of the airport.
After arriving we've been brought to a room with tables of sandwiches and other various foods for a lunch. Everyone's also received a name badge, an obviously LaTeX-made leaflet with schedule and other handy information. We've then been divided into groups of 8 for the next day's "hands-on IoT project". The groups were apparently picked so that we'd all get an interesting mix of nationalities, which worked out pretty well.
Then a series of presentations started, featuring a brief history of the Hursley complex, something about Homomorphic encryption (which was apparently included just to illustrate the huge range of IBM's research), and lastly but most importantly an introduction to Node Red and MQTT, technologies we'd need for the next day's project.
Followed a dinner in the "Hursley clubhouse" (basically a small pub next to a cricket field on the IBM grounds), with barbecue, beer and some delicious cheesecakes. The beer was free (just like all the food), so some took advantage of that, as expected. I got a pint of some lager and that was quite enough.
We've then had a quick tour of the IBM Computer Museum (some of us, anyway), which is located in the cellar of the antique-looking building we've had lunch in before. The exhibits include core memories, punch cards, the first small yet giant HDDs, typewriters, a non-portable "laptop" and an exposition of ThinkPads (including one with a neat "butterfly keyboard", which regrettably didn't really catch on).
The day ended with us receiving dorm keys and eduroam credentials, some going to their rooms, others to the local pubs and bars to watch football. Fair to say that the Winchester University dorms are modern, neat & tidy, unlike what you get in the Czech Republic.
Only disappointment was the lack of europlug adapters, so we were left with charging our stuff in the bathroom from the "shaver outlet". Apparently you can also use the regular sockets, if you first stuff something thin into the grounding hole (a pen worked well). That opens the hatches for the other two holes and you can force your type-C plug in the socket. Just make sure you switch the socket off beforehand, this can be a bit dangerous (and I suppose against the safety rules, too).
The day started with all of us gathering at a designated pickup spot and waiting 45 minutes for our bus. Not quite sure what happened, but it must've been some misunderstanding, for we've later found the bus waiting some 300 meters down the road, at an apparently better parking spot. To top off the misery (we were all hungry waiting for breakfast at the IBM canteen), about a quarter didn't fit on the bus and had to wait for a second round (I managed to squeeze in the first one).
Arriving at Hursley, we've been handed vouchers and went to get some long overdue breakfast. We then moved into two classrooms for some presentations and to finally start working on the IoT project. What we gat was a latest-gen Raspberry Pi (the one with WiFi) with — surprise, surprise — some ESP8266, the ubiquitous WiFi modules you can get for $2 on eBay.
Each module was equipped with various environmental sensors — pressure, humidity, exposure and temperature. Each also had a button and a red LED for indication. We've been given no instructions what to build, just some info in the handbook on how to set everything up, the idea being to see what we'll come up with.
Interleaved with a few more presentations and a lunch break, we continuied building and experimenting until the evening. The biggest constraint turned out to be a bug in Node Red, where it's basically impossible for multiple people to work on the same project, each save overwriting everyone else's work. That's lead to a situation where one or two were building the flow, while the others worked on a presentation or just watched. Shame.
Another issue was with the ESP8266's, which didn't really like fast polling. They were hooked up using MQTT, which is quite resource heavy, sitting on top of the TCP/IP stack, and since the firmware is partially closed source, memory leaks are hard to find and debug — eventually you get a heap-stack collision and things go haywire.
Two of our 8 modules also somehow died overnight (we continued working on the project the next day), in a way that not even a battery change helped. That's not exactly new to me, I've had a similar issue earlier working with those chips, when it entered a strange bootloop and basically cooked itself. Must be a firmware bug of some kind.
After wrapping it up for the day, we went to get some dinner at the Club house. This time it was pizzas and, again, lots of beer. Now especially the French discovered that there's other beverages at the bar, so it got more interesting. We've heard the Marseillaise a few times, getting worse and louder each time.
The fun then moved to the Winchester pubs and apparently continued long into the night. I took an advantage of getting there relatively early and had a stroll through the city of Winchester, checking out the cathedral and marvelling at the amazing brick houses I've read about in numerous books but never had a chance to see for myself. It was really nice, especially in the evening light (or, rather, remnants thereof). Regrettably the photos didn't come out too well, not even HDR could compensate much for the twilight.
The day started just like before, except this time the bus was where it was supposed to be and we got to Hursley on schedule. After a breakfast, the IoT project continued and we also got a short presentation by some guy who worked on memory technology at IBM (hard drives, mostly).
The time constraints lead to no group really 100% finishing they project, but we still had some interesting outputs. Two or more groups worked on counting people, some tried to build games with the sensors' buttons and LEDs, and one made a twitter-connected kettle monitor ("Your tea is ready!").
We (team 4) initially wanted to count people using shadows. Then we moved on to counting cars, but we couldn't deploy it on a public round (bummer), so we changed it back to counting people, with logging to a CSV file and a webpage displaying the count. Nothing too fancy, but it (kind of) worked.
Being done with the project, we grabbed ourselves some sandwiches and fruit for lunch and hopped on the buses to take us to the airport. Now starts the less fun part, that is, some 5 hours of waiting for the flight. There's not much to do at the airport, and we didn't have enough time for a worthwhile visit to London.
Maybe another time...
Now, was it fun? YES! Useful? Maybe... I won't be using Node Red, but I'm planning to get some RPis, they're great.
IBM paid everything, including the flight, so no complains there at all! I wonder how it pays back though. It looks like an interesting place for an internship, that might be what they're after. It can work out.
The "networking" thing really meant just talking about each other's school, work et cetera. It was an opportunity to get a bit better at speaking English, too. I'm not much of a social type, but there were more of us like that, so it worked great!
I'd totally go again.
That won't happen, but I intend to visit Britain at least once more, do some sightseeing and perhaps hiking. There's only two years left, until they really break from the EU and we'll have to deal with visas and other nonsense.