In a landmark partnership between CR Kennedy and Hexagon, Australian academic institutions were offered an exclusive internship at Leica Geosystems headquarters at the end of 2023. Lucy Illek, a standout second-year student from the University of Newcastle, won this prestigious spot. Here's her second diary entry, detailing her innovative journey at Leica.
Read Lucy's first journal entry here.
"At Leica, we make sure we walk the walk and test our devices rigorously in different conditions and against competition as well. This involves taking many measurements in a lot of different environments. For me, this means helping with the measurement, but also with the processing. This type of analysis has ramped up for us recently. It was previously all analysed on Excel, but as we needed to change the formulas each time, we did a test it was extremely time-consuming.
Given that we will be completing more of these tests in the next few months and that I would have to be the one changing the Excel formulas every time, I decided to unearth some long-lost memories of coding from first year uni (with some guidance from YouTube, ChatGPT and some of my coding colleagues). I have written some elementary code for us to be able to make this process a lot faster. I have to say, I really enjoy that this internship keeps me busy, but also allows some extra time for me to learn useful skills while optimising some processes so the team can work just a little faster in the future.
I will be using this code when I complete testing for a Mid-Range competition analysis to see where the GS07 stacks up against other similar products. This information is useful to us in two ways. Firstly, to allow customers to purchase our existing products as well-informed decision makers. It is also a handy guide for future innovation projects to understand the existing market and predict where to go next.
I’ve had the pleasure to test out some Outside World Interface (OWI) based software and the compatibility of our products with them. It’s been great to get an introduction to a wider range of software, and work with other companies within Hexagon to develop optimised solutions for our customers.
Some testing that we are currently working on is for the tilt initialisation bar to be implemented in Leica Captivate when using the GS18T/I products. It has already been implemented for the AP20, and I have to say working with the bar takes the guesswork out of how long tilt will stay initialised for, in turn making measurement taking that much easier. It was awesome to be involved in a new technology's testing process. It was interesting to see how we set certain requirements and thoroughly evaluated the tilt initialisation bar functionality before we gave the go ahead that it could be to be implemented. I look forward to working with this technology as standard in the future, as I know it will help other surveyors."
