EW BrightSparks 2023 profile: Lewis Thom, GB Electronics

Now in its sixth year of awards, EW BrightSparks sees Electronics Weekly highlight and celebrate some of the brightest and most talented young engineers in the UK today.

Here, in our series on the latest EW BrightSparks of 2023, we profile Lewis Thom, a Design Engineer at GB Electronics.

Achievements

His manager who nominated him – a former EW BrightSparks winner himself, from 2017, Alex Croucher – hailed him as someone who has “excelled in his four years at GB Electronics”: Lewis’s “hard work, perseverance and incredible work ethic deserves this recognition,” Alex told us.

Lewis started with GB Electronics as a Degree Apprentice (he just graduated last July) and quickly proved himself as an essential member of the design team.

“He is successfully running multiple design projects simultaneously, including managing other team members, liaising with clients and creating implementation plans and strategies,” we learned.

As well as this, he is working on the electronic design of company products. To date, he has helped develop over 10 projects, which have ranged from medical devices, to consumer electronics.

His role within these projects has covered all stages of the product lifecycle – from creating high level architecture and block diagram concepts, schematic capture and PCB layout in Altium Designer, writing test plans and carrying out detailed verification using specialist test equipment, EMC and safety testing and developing low level C code for a range of different microcontrollers.

One notable project saw Lewis leading the design and development of a new blood tracking system as part of a brand new concept. Lewis carried out all of the initial research stages of this design – including visiting partnering hospitals to get feedback from users and clinicians. This also involved giving presentations with the client – which Lewis developed and led.

“Lewis carried out the electronic design for this system, working closely with colleagues for review and feedback. This involved working with our industrial designer to ensure a good electro-mechanical fit within an enclosure and taking into consideration user interaction. Lewis also detailed the specification of the product as well as carrying out DFMEA (Design Failure Mode & Effects Analysis) and risk analysis taking into consideration all product standards and foreseeable mis-use.”

“Lewis worked closely with our manufacturing site to produce a batch of prototypes and carried out full verification of the prototypes – giving detailed test reports for GB Electronics and the client.”

The product has been a great success, we learned, and has led on to further development to bring it to the market.

Another project Lewis was heavily involved with, was the design of a sleep-aid for babies and young children.

The product monitored the temperature of the child’s room and alerted the user if the temperature was outside of the safe recommended range.

“Lewis worked with the software team to introduce MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) communication from the device to a smart phone App. MQTT was new to GB Electronics, so Lewis’ understanding, research and work on this led to successful completion of the project. Lewis also worked closely with the client on this project, suggesting suitable interfaces and procedures for setup and operation of the product for enhanced user experience.”

In summary, Lewis has the ability to get involved with a whole range of products, bringing a positive attitude and time management skills to ensure projects are delivered on time.

“Therefore, although primarily a design engineer, he has quickly created himself the role of project manager due to his ability to bring the team together, improving communication throughout the company.”

“GB Electronics acquired a software team as part of our continuous growth. Lewis was instrumental in working closely with the new software team – who were mainly practiced in high-level application software and bridged the knowledge gap with developing low-level embedded firmware. Lewis was key in the success of bringing in this new software team and integrating it with the design team – organising Trello boards and Scrum meetings for team collaboration.”

Community

In terms of STEM or community involvement, Lewis has been heavily involved with a local sixth form, Worthing College, we learned.

He has been organising work experience students multiple times a year – heading up visits from the electronics students to GB Electronics for taster days, to help get an insight into real world electronics design and manufacture.

Lewis has also been volunteering his Friday afternoons, leading workshops on a weekly basis and getting the students to design an electronic rugby score board. This enables the students to explore Altium CAD design, creating schematics and PCB layouts.

This has been such a huge success that GB Electronics is now working in partnership with the college to provide suitable candidates for degree apprentice programmes with the design department in the future.

Lewis has been instrumental in this partnership and promoting STEM careers with the students, his nominator told us.