It is a revolution; Thabo Ndaba, an Electronic Engineering student at the National University of Lesotho (NUL) is developing electronic brains (PCBs) that will lift Lesotho’s technology to the next levels under the supervision of Mr Seforo Mohlalisi and Mr Thabo Koetje. His Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) will be used in a number of electronic products and machines under development at the NUL. Take his PCBs, have a closer look at them, and you will enjoy the beauty and complexity of the design. But that is not the point! The point is the potential stored therein. In a simple language, those small things, the PCBs, will soon do great things for Lesotho and you will know it! You will agree that few things appeal to humans’ sense of awe and wonder than electronic products, chief of which is the incredible computer! Radios, cellphones, televisions, toys, you name the gadgets; are the brainchildren of electronic engineers minds. For instance, who among you have not, in their childhood, torn up a radio or cellphone only to be disappointed that there was no one talking in there after all—expect, of course, for the presence of motionless silent PCBs? The PCBs are sometimes called green boards (they are traditionally green in colour although they now come in various colours). When you take those gadgets, what you normally see, on the outside, is just a cover. The real “life” of these gadgets is actually on the PCB, that thing which you normally take a quick look at and turn away from! They seem complicated, don’t they? That hasn’t discouraged Ndaba from designing and making them—for a good reason. They will help push Lesotho to the next level of technological development! Very soon! “We designed this PCB to control our state-of-the-art robotic incubator with the help of microcontroller chip as a "brain"” said the supervisors Koetje and Mohlalisi, pointing to a red PCB! “This other PCB is going to control a drone,” Mr Ndaba added, pointing to a smaller green PCB.” That unmanned aircraft, a drone, is what you will mount your camera on and take aerial pictures of your ceremonies. The news of its development at the NUL was broken right on this wall! And there are more PCBs coming as NUL still has a number of very, very important machines and industrial plants in development! Now, the hard part (of course don’t leave, we will struggle to make the hard simple)! What are these PCBs anyway and how exactly do they function? Reflect on their name again; Printed Circuit Boards. “They are printed boards on which electronic components are mounted to make a sophisticated circuit” Ndaba said. Observe a PCB and you will see quite a network of circuits, which appear as if they are drawn on a board. “Tiny electrical messages are conveyed through that network we call “tracks,”” he said. To illustrate, he tried to make the simplest example possible. Let’s think about the things we and you do know about electricity and how it works. You surely know something about a battery, a switch and a Light Emitting Diode (LED). Don’t frown at the mention of an LED; it is that tiny red or green light which lets you know when your radio or your computer is on! Yep! You have seen it! If a switch is on, in a circuit, electricity will move from the battery to an LED and you will see the light. In the lab, you could use wires to connect all the three. If you want to go commercial, you lay wires off, and you put the system on a PCB where “tracks” now takes the place of the wires! PCBs are lighter, use less space, are less messy compared to the often experimental breadbords, and they are more stable; that is; they kind’a like help you avoid the problem of wires pulling out at critical moments. Before we finish, let’s introduce you to the most amazing of those many tiny things on the PCB: a Micro-Controller. If a Micro-Controller is a commander, all other components including the switches, the LEDs, resistors, and so on, are the soldiers. The Micro-Controller which gets its instructions from the engineers after computer programs are downloaded on them, give commands and the rest of the components obey. Now add a programmed Micro-Controller to the system and guess what, the controller can now “command” the LED lights when to give out light and when not to, and “command” the switch as to when to be on and off. This is what we call automation! Now, don’t say we didn’t tell you when in 20 years’ time, NUL will be launching a rocket to the moon, thanks in part to the mighty PCBs. But before that, NUL scientists are busy making machines that will help you eat! When every belly is full, we will then shoot for the moon! You bet!
