Cooper Ellidge

7.00 AM

After snoozing my alarm an unhealthy amount, I roll out of bed and go downstairs to feed our pets, two cats and a puppy. I scroll through the usual feeds before taking our puppy for a short walk around the block. Once I’m back, I’ll either have a quick breakfast or a smoothie. No coffee yet. Weather-dependent, I’ll walk to the office or catch the bus.

8.30 AM 

Once I arrive at work, I make myself a long black coffee in the café (today gets an extra espresso shot). Back at my desk, I check emails and look at my calendar. Some people are selling second hand items through our buy-and-sell email list, but more pressing is a Saab Social Club invite to an Adelaide Hills wine tasting event. 

9.00 AM 

After the morning emails are actioned, I ready myself for today’s task by reminding myself where I got to yesterday and creating a quick to-do list for today. Yesterday, I was finishing implementing coordinate transformations for my vehicle motion simulator. However, I was having issues with one set of rotations, so I get to work trying to debug the problem.

9.45 AM 

Coffee round two, same order. I have a team stand-up where our team members go through what they’re working on and if they’re facing any blockers. This is usually a good time to offer assistance to other people if you can. 

10.00 AM

Back to work, and my coordinate transforms still are not working exactly as expected. I go over to the whiteboard and start drawing out my problem with vectors and coordinate axes to make sure the transformations are correctly implemented. They seem to be correct, so I’m more confused than ever. But then I realise my testing code itself is using the wrong coordinate frames… I promptly update the tests and finally my issue is solved!

12.30 PM 

Time for lunch. I’ll often go to the on-site café or occasionally go into Mawson Lakes for lunch, but today I brought lunch in with me. I go down to the courtyard where there are other grads having lunch and catch-up with them.

1.00 PM 

I have some emails that need sending. As graduate engineers, we mentor high school students with the Subs in Schools program. I need to organise the time for our next session with the teachers. Additionally, a few of us grads are scoping out Saabs involvement with the Space in Schools program so I need to reach out to some experts within Saab to involve them in planning.

2.00 PM 

Back to work, and with the coordinate transformation issue resolved, I want to add aerodynamics model to my simulator. But first one final coffee for the day. Jumping over to the sacred whiteboard, I start writing out the equations for aerodynamic forces that I need to implement. I am going to start simple and add complexity later as higher fidelity is needed for the model. Once the code is written, I begin making sure it passes some simple tests, such as getting an accurate terminal velocity and simple trajectories are correctly followed when accounting for lift and drag. 

4.00 PM

Whats the use in running a simulation if you don’t have pretty animations? Currently, the data is all numerical and I want to have something more visual to better understand the model and share the results with others. I first start by making two-dimensional plots, showing how the velocity and accelerations are changing over time. Then, I plot and animate the trajectories in three-dimensions. There is definitely more I can add to the data visualisations, but for now, it is good enough to get a solid idea of what is going on.

5.00 PM

Time for home now. I write down the main things I did for today and what I want to do tomorrow so I don’t forget where I left off. I log off, clear my desk, and then head home.