NATCHEZ — One Trinity Episcopal Day School student decided to take his passion for computer engineering to the next level over the summer.

Having previous summer camp experience learning how to program software, senior Hunter Yarbrough of Natchez thought he would try his hand at building a circuit rig at the University of California at Los Angeles campus.

“If I’m to truly understand computer engineering, I also need to know about electrical engineering,” Yarbrough said. “I thought electrical engineering was the next step. You need to understand how the hardware works.”

In the one-week camp in mid-July, Yarbrough worked with aspects including wires, pins, sockets and how to work with negative and positive charges in constructing a circuit board to perform various functions. The camp taught him how to incorporate button applications into circuit boards, which could also tie into programs for LED lights and an LED screen.

The camp led to a final project that Yarbrough joked he unfortunately couldn’t bring back to Mississippi because the flight security might think it was a bomb.

His project had three buttons that connected to an LED screen, which could scroll through different weather patterns for the area and could also go into more detail. Yarbrough said it took him about five hours to put it together and program it.

“For my final project, I wanted to use the screen to incorporate a visual element,” he said. “I programmed the screen to use the Internet to collect the weather data for the location we were in.

“You could scroll through the weather in the area, precipitation, humidity, wind speed and also forecasted the upcoming days.”

Beating the weather in Los Angeles is difficult, he said. Yarbrough said the UCLA campus was beautiful and the city itself offered a lot of sight seeing opportunities.

“My favorite part was probably the Santa Monica Pier,” he said. “It was a really nice beach with a lot of people to talk to and a pier that had a lot of attractions and great places to eat.”

Yarbrough said he was one of the few people at the camp from the United States. He said because of that he was able to make friends from Russia, Turkey, China and Japan with whom he still communicates.

“It was really interesting to meet people from other cultures,” he said. “You do realize they view things around the world differently from us. But although they view things differently, they are still great people.”

Yarbrough, the son of Brad Yarbrough and Lena McKnight, said he first got interested in engineering through a relative who is a chemical engineer focusing on petroleum. From there, he did some research online about engineering and knew he already had a passion for computers.

“It’s challenging,” he said. “When I built a computer, it was both exciting and scary, which is what sparked me to keep doing it.

“I felt like it was an impossible task at times, but I wanted to succeed anyway.”

Though he hasn’t decided where he is going to school yet, Yarbrough has been exploring different technical schools in the South along with his father’s alma mater, the University of Arkansas.

“The school has a great engineering program,” he said. “Fayetteville (Ark.) is also the third-best place to live in the U.S.”

Yarbrough said when he is a professional he hopes to run the gamut with computers — building, repairing, programming both computers and software and whatever else he can master.

“There’s always something you can learn with computers,” he said. “I have a passion for it, and I want to stick with something I love.”