Proceedings of the 1999 IEEUASME
International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics
September 19-23,1999 Atlanta, USA
Undergraduate Mechatronics at Stanford University
J. Edward Carryer Assoc. Member, ASME
Design Division of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract - This paper discusses a one-quarter mechatronics
course designed for undergraduate mechanical engineers.
Details of the content and structure of the course are
examined along with the rationale behind the design of the
course and choice of content. The paper will be most useful
to those seeking successful examples of content, organization
and design of mechatronicscourses that they may draw upon
in designing and implementing their own courses.
I INTRODUCTION
As far back as 1978, Stanford has offered a mechatronics
course to graduate students in Mechanical Engineering
(ME). The Smart Product Design series (ME218a,b,c,d)
is currently a 4-quarter sequence of classes which teach
Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Science (CS) and
Systems Engineering to ME students. The focus of the
course sequence is on the use of microprocessors as
components of machines, as opposed to computers as
controllers of machines. As such, the emphasis in the
laboratory is on %bit microcomputers (currently the
Motorola MC68HC11) that are embedded into the student
projects. The courses concentrate on bringing content
from traditional EE and CS topics to mechanical
engineers and providing a venue for these students to gain
experience in implementing integrated Mechatronic
systems.
The overall goal of the course sequence is to produce
engineers that are conversant in all of the non-mechanical
engineering technologies necessary to design and
implement a modern electro-mechanical product. These
courses teach mechanical engineering students enough
about electronics and software that they will be able to be
effective interdisciplinary team members and leaders.
The philosophy is that the best way to learn the
capabilities of the technology is to actually apply it
yourself.
Starting more than five years ago, undergraduate students
who were familiar with the accomplishments of the
graduate Smart Product Design students began to request
that a similar course be offered at the undergraduate
level. In Spring quarter 1994, after six months of intense
development funded by NSF through the Synthesis
Coalition, ME 1 18: “Introduction to Mechatronics” was
offered for the first time.
This ten week long undergraduate course preserves the
same hands-on laboratory orientation of the graduate
course. It consists of four hours of formal lectures a
0-7803-5038-3/99/$10.000 1999 IEEE
week, four laboratory assignments and a final four-week
long open-ended team design project. The design project
is on par with the kind of project that would be done half
way through the second quarter of the graduate
mechatronics course (ME218b). The balance of this paper
presents the philosophy behind the design of the course
along with detailed information on the content and the
rationale behind this choice of content.
I1 COURSE DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
The design of ME1 18 reflects a deep conviction that the
field of mechatronics is about applying technology and
that mechatronics courses should give students ample
opportunity to apply what they are learning. The design
process for the new course began with a review of the
graduate courses and a series of informal interviews with
graduates of the ME218 sequence. From these, the project
experience was identified as the core element that people
took away from the course. The completion of projects
engendered a sense of empowerment in the students that
allowed them to comfortably tackle new technologies,
including those that they had not learned as part of the
class.
This finding lead to a decision which guided many of the
choices regarding content and structure of the new
course; it should include a significant design project
experience with deliverables on par with those produced
by students in the second quarter of the masters sequence
(ME218b). Much of the rest of the structure of the course
and choice of material were guided by the goal of
preparing students to take on this project in the last few
weeks of the course.
The project features so prominently in the design of the
course because the experiences of the graduate students
emphasized the importance of the project in the
solidification of the material in the course. For students to
gain technical competency, the feeling of
accomplishment and a sense of empowerment, the project
also needs to be of a significant scale. This scale, in turn,
drives the project to be a team project (as it is in the
masters sequence).
While the scale of the project determined that it would
need to be a team effort, it is important to recognize that
it was the decision about the scope (or complexity) of the
project that defined the course. The nature of the projects
defined not only what content would be taught, but also
the set of tools that would be provided to facilitate
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tackling this class of problems with only seven weeks of together electronics, computers, software and mechanical
preparation. This is in contrast to a course structure where systems in a way that emphasizes the interactions.
the project is chosen to fit what could be taught in seven 111 THECOURSE STRUCTURE
weeks.
The course is offered for four units on a quarter basis and
The course design process also identified the specific set consists of a combination of more or less traditional
of goals shown in Table 1. lectures, semi-structured laboratory assignments and a
final open-ended team design project. During the course
(1) Remove students’fear of electronics
of the quarter the students complete several problem sets
(2) Become comfortable with the terms and meanings and quizzes, a formal examination and written laboratory
associated with Mechatronic systems and project reports. The partitioning of credit among the
(3) Learn the basics of applying: course components (65% Labproject, 35%
H-Bridges homework/exams/quizzes) reflects a belief that the
Op-Amps material is actually learned by applying it.
DC and stepper motors
Simple sensors The Lectures
Analog to digital converters Of the 20 1hr 50min. lecture periods available in the 10
week quarter, 16 are devoted to more or less traditional
(4) Gain firsthand experience with:
lectures delivering content material. The remaining four
Motors
Simple signal conditioning lectures are used for a short lecture/lab exercise, an early
‘Real Time’software project design review with student presentations, a post
Reading device and board level specification sheets project review with reflections on the project outcome
Using software libraries and a final period devoted to an overall course review.
Commercial microcontrollers The content of the actual lectures can be roughly divided
Applying the technology to an open ended problem into five categories: Electronics, Software, Actuators,
(5) Gain confidence and competence in integrating, Integration and Enrichment. The lecture titles and lab
implementing and debugging schedule are shown in Table 2. The laboratory schedule
(6) View electronics, computing and software as additional drives the order of the lectures. This lecture schedule is
design tools. designed to deliver the required content material by the
Table 1 ME1 18 Course Goals time the associated lab assignment goes out.
kk. Tuesday Thursday
What Makes This a Mechatronics Course? I Course Introduction and Basic Lab 0 What’s A Microprocessor
Before going into of the content of the course, it is Circuits Review
important to understand what makes this a mechatronics 2’ Event Driven Programming Lab I Digital Inputs
course and therefore different from traditional courses in 3 op-Amps Sensors Lab 2
4 Digital Outputs and Power E€ Motors
electronics or software. In reviewing the description of I Drivers I I I
the content of this course, as discussed in the next 5 I Stepper Motors I
IMid- A/D.D/A and Timers lLab 3
section, it would be easy to characterize it as electronics
for non-electrical engineers with a bit of programming for 6 Modular Software Design Project Management Project
non-computer scientists thrown in. While these 7 Design Review Noise Grounding and
Isolation
descriptions may be accurate for the specific content of 8 Power Supplies and Batteries Intro to the Basic Stamp
some parts of the course, they m i s s the real 9 HLL. Interpreters, Compilers Communications, Serial and
differentiating factor that makes a mechatronics course land Assembly Language 1 lothenvise I
unique. 10 IProject Review I ICourse Review
Table 2 Lecture and Lab Time-table
Mechatronics is about integration. The strength of a
mechatronics solution, as opposed to a “traditional” Electronics topics begin on the first day with a review of
solution, lies in the synergistic combination of the the required material from the pre-requisite electronics
capabilities represented by the parent fields of course. The state of electronics today is such that most of
Mechanics, Electronics and Software. To achieve this the analysis necessary can be carried out with only a
strength, the mechatronics engineer must possess relatively simple level of understanding of the behavior
knowledge across the traditional disciplines and be able of resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes and transistors.
to synthesize from all three, choosing the appropriate This material is reviewed in about 1-9’2 hr. and reinforced
solutions from among the possibilities. Mechatronics with the first laboratory assignment.
engineering education must provide students with the
A lecture period is devoted to understanding and
knowledge of all three disciplines that will allow them to
examining the characteristics of digital inputs and how
effectively perform that synthesis. This course brings

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they are specified in data sheets. This includes the
concept of required input current, sourcing/sinking,
minimum voltage levels associated with logic states, and
the behavior of Schmitt trigger inputs and where they are
useful. This lecture also introduces the different logic
‘families’ (LS, C, HC etc.) and addresses the issues
associated with mixing families within a design.
The lecture on digital outputs deals with differences
between totem-pole (push-pull) output stages and open
collector/drain outputs. Students learn how to examine
data sheets to find the specifications for the
characteristics of the device outputs as well as recognize
open collector/drain outputs based on their specifications.
This lecture relates back to the digital inputs lecture by
examining more closely the compatibility between
different logic families. This material is important for
students to be able to evaluate the compatibility between
a logic output and the inputs of a device that they would
like to drive. This same lecture introduces power output
devices, such as the so-called peripheral driver integrated
circuits (IC), and examines how to interpret their
specification sheets.
Analog electronics are covered in two lectures nominally
focused on operational amplifiers and sensors. Op-Amps
are, for the most part, treated as ideal devices. Students
learn the basic configurations and how to analyze circuits
involving negative feedback. The two non-idealities that
cause the most problems, common mode input voltage
range and output voltage swing, are introduced and the
students alerted to the impact that these limitations can
have on their designs. The Sensors lecture presents
switches and phototransistors as sensors. Students are
introduced to switch bounce and how to get around it,
both in hardware and in software. In addition, this lecture
shows students how to integrate op-amps with RC circuits
to build filters. The contents of this lecture will be very
important in the project where they will have to build
circuitry to allow them to detect a modulated IR beacon.
The lecture titled A/D, D/A and Timers introduces the
basic techniques used for A/D and D/A conversions and
the specifications of interest related to these devices. This
lecture also blends a bit of software in, as it deals with
how a combination of software, a micro-controller timer
and a bit of external hardware can be used to perform
A/D and D/A conversions.
The power supplies and batteries lecture is really a
combination of immediately useful electronics and
enrichment. The emphasis here is on the use of 3-terminal
regulators to produce a regulated voltage. This is a device
that many teams end up using in their projects. In the
context of designing with these devices, students are also
introduced to the thermal issues associated with power
dissipation and heat sinks. Batteries are covered briefly to
introduce the basic chemistries and characteristics of
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primary and secondary cells. This is considered
enrichment since the projects are allowed to use desk-top
power supplies and do not require batteries.
This set of electronics topics was chosen as the
(approximately) minimal set necessary to allow students
to be able to connect external chips to micro-controller
outputs and condition external signals in the way required
to be able to present them to a micro-controller’s inputs.
With what they have learned, students can, and do, go out
and find new chips that they would like to use and are
able to interpret the specification sheets to the level
necessary to incorporate them into their projects.
Software content begins in the second lecture with a
review of the relationships between . binary &
hexadecimal notation. These relationships are particularly
important in order to explain how to set and clear
individual bits using byte-oriented instructions. The
lecture continues with an introduction to microcomputers,
addressing and address spaces, the different types of
memory (RAM, ROM etc) and the different types of
input/output devices on typical micro-controllers. The
next lecture focuses on software structures for event
driven programming. This includes the concept of non-
blocking code and an introduction to state machines as a
design and implementation tool [I]. This lecture is
somewhat atypical in that it includes a group exercise.
After the concepts related to state machines are
introduced, the class is divided up into small (3-4 person)
groups and asked to come up with a state diagram to
describe the behavior of a simple microwave oven. After
10-15 min. to work on the problem, several groups are
asked to volunteer to come up and present their solutions.
This exercise has proven very effective at quickly finding
misconceptions about how state machines work and
emphasizes the fact that there are multiple state diagrams
that correctly capture the behavior of the oven. Doing this
exercise in class allows the misconceptions to be cleared
up before students are asked to apply this material in a
homework assignment. Another strong point of this
exercise is that it drives home how you can use the state
diagram as a debugging tool to test the behavior of the
design before it has been committed to code. Generally
one of the groups presenting has a fatal flaw in their
diagram that gets caught in a walk-through. This lecture
concludes with a walk-through of a piece of example
code that demonstrates the use of the provided event
driven programming framework, state machines and how
to use them in ‘C’.
The final lecture focused on software comes just before
the project description is handed out. This lecture focuses
on modular software design and the ‘C’ constructs
necessary to implement such concepts as information
hiding and encapsulation. Some of this material is review
for a few students, but the information on the mechanics
of how to implement a program composed of multiple
modules is new to most of them. This aspect of
programming will be critical when the project arrives and
it will be necessary to have multiple people working on
code that will have to be integrated into a single program.
This set of software content was chosen to complement
the material covered in the pre-requisite programming
methodology course. The concepts of event driven
programming and state machines are topics not covered
in the introductory programming courses but are
incredibly powerful in the context of mechatronic
systems. The issues associated with modular
programming are touched on, but not heavily emphasized
in the programming course. That course is taught via
individual programming assignments, while the project in
this course will require collaborative implementation by a
team of programmers. Both of these topic sets were
chosen based on the experiences from the masters level
courses. In those courses the quality of the code improved
and the numbers of failures associated with software
declined after this material was introduced.
Actuators are introduced near the middle of the quarter.
The course content deals exclusively with electro-
magnetic actuators with the emphasis given to DC and
stepper motors. The DC motor lecture presents the
torque:speed relationship for brushed and brushless DC
motors, with the bulk of the time spent on brushed
motors. Students learn not only to decipher a typical DC
motor data sheet, but also the equations describing torque
and speed as a function of current and voltage and the
equation relating speed to torque. Particular attention is
paid to deriving the required motor characteristic
constants from a limited set of measurements on a motor.
This will be important during the project, when most
teams will be using surplus market DC motors for which
data sheets are not available. Speed control for brushed
DC motors is covered with the introduction of pulse
width modulation (PWM). This leads to a discussion on
how to choose the frequency of the PWM and the
interaction between the PWM frequency and mechanical
time constant of the motor and drive train. This lecture
also includes a group exercise in which teams are given a
set of measurements taken on a motor and are asked to
answer questions about that motor in an application.
These include such things as the motor’s ability to meet
the torque and speed requirements of the application, the
ability of a particular power driver IC to drive that motor,
and an estimate of the running current at the desired
operating point.
The stepper motor lecture introduces the basic operation
of a stepper motor and several specific types (permanent
magnet, variable reluctance and hybrid), along with
winding topologies that the students are likely to
encounter. The material presented includes the basic
dynamic behavior of stepper motors as well as how to
interpret the information presented on typical data sheets.
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Drive methods are covered for both uni-polar and bi-
polar motors including L/R drive to improve
performance. Stepping strategies such as full step, half
step and wave drive are introduced along with the use of
typical stepper motor drive ICs.
I
As with most of the topics covered in the course, the
actuator lectures content was chosen as the approximately
minimal amount of information necessary to allow
students to be able to effectively choose and use these
devices in their project. The lectures are structured and
the material presented in a way that emphasizes the
relationship between data sheet , parameters and the
behavior of the motor as it affects a designer.
Integration focused lectures are presented about the time
that the project description is handed out. They begin
with a lecture on Project Management. This lecture is
designed to introduce the students to the basic planning
and .evaluation tools that they can use to guide their
project. Gantt charts and morphological charts are
introduced along with methodologies for evaluating
design alternatives. This is a lecture that was not part of
the original course design. It was added after several
offerings of the course showed that students were
struggling with planning the activities of multiple team
members over the four weeks of the project. Its
introduction has made a noticeable improvement
(reduction) in the amount of last minute thrashing and all-
nighters that students spend in completing the project.
The other integration lecture is focused on noise
grounding and isolation. This is a topic that is not well
covered in most texts yet year after year has proven to be
a significant problem to students during the system
integration phase. This lecture emphasizes the most
common noise coupling channels (conductive and
capacitive) and introduces strategies that the students can
use to identify the coupling channel. Students learn that
once they have identified the likely noise source and the
coupling channel, there are a number of measures that
they can take to reduce or eliminate the coupling of noise
into their circuits.
Enrichment lectures are presented during the final weeks
leading up to the project presentations. The lectures on
languages (HLL, Interpreters.. .) and Communications are
designed to acquaint students with concepts and issues
that are important in mechatronics but not immediately
necessary in the lab. They involve minimal reading
preparation ( a good thing because students will be
working on their projects) and generally provide students
with a very interactive forum. In these lectures they come
to see the differences between programming languages
and such things as how modems work. The Introduction
to the Basic Stamp is done as a short (15 min.) lecture
followed by a team exercise in the lab. The purpose of the
lecture/exercise is to convince the students that they have
learned enough to be able to pick up a new single board
computer and quickly learn to put it to work. Over the
course of 1 ?hhours, teams learn a new development
environment and build a simple thermostat. The exercise
has been so successful that a number of teams have then
incorporated the Basic Stamp into their projects along
with the 68HC11. This is another example of a lecture
that was not part of the original course design. This
lecture/exercise was added in response to student
feedback they were unsure that they could actually apply
what they had learned outside the lab environment.
The Laboratory Assignments
There are a total of four semi-structured laboratory
assignments during the quarter. All of these assignments
are scheduled in the first six weeks of the quarter. AS a
whole, the labs are intended to reinforce the lecture
material through application, introduce the students to the
facilities of the lab, and allow them to gain experience
using the hardware and software modules that are
provided to support the course. These labs are semi-
structured in the sense that, in most instances, we do not
tell the students exactly how to do what needs to be done.
In three of the four labs students are designing and
creating original software in the C language using a
cross-compiler running under Windows 95. In two of the
labs they are also building electronic hardware.
Lab 0 is a combination of review and introduction to
laboratory facilities. The content focuses on exploring the
behavior of RC circuits as low-pass filters, high-pass
filters and high-pass filters with offset. Students explore
these circuits through a combination of analysis, circuit
simulation and observation of the behavior of physical
circuits. The opportunity to compare simulated
waveforms to real waveforms prepares students to use the
oscilloscope to interpret the behavior of circuits that they
will build later in the quarter. Specifically, the goal is for
students to be able to recognize the behavior of an RC
circuit and its configuration by examining the response of
the circuit.
Lab 1 is a student’s first opportunity to program a
mechatronic system. In this lab, the students program a
small vehicle, referred to as a ‘cockroach’, to drive
around trying to find the dark. The vehicle is built from a
small (12” long) radio controlled (RC) car. The RC
controls are removed and replaced by a small single
board computer with H-bridges to control the drive motor
and steering, bump sensors at the front and back corners
and a photo-resistive light sensor. The students program
the vehicles using state machines that they implement in
‘C’ using a provided event driven framework, PWM and
timer libraries. For most students this is their first
experience with state machines, event driven
programming and producing an output that is something
more than dots on a video display. The lab is placed very
589
early in the quarter to allow it to serve as a motivational
experience. Most students report really enjoying this lab,
despite their struggling with the programming, because it
was so much fun to see the vehicle run around following
a set of rules that they defined.
Lab 2 gives the student an opportunity to apply
operational amplifiers and comparators to a signal
conditioning problem. The students build up a low
frequency (1kHz) oscillator, based on a 555, and use it to
drive an infra red (IR) LED as a signal source. They then
build up various configurations of photo-transistor, op-
amp and comparator circuits to explore the behavior of
the sensor and signal conditioning circuitry. One of the
key lessons that the students take away from this lab is
how to deal with a modulated signal in the presence of a
varying offset (due to the IR radiation from the sun). This
lesson will be important for the signal conditioning that
they will need to do for the project.
Lab 3 introduces students to some of the realities
involved in driving brushed DC motors using PWM and
stepper motors using special purpose ICs. To investigate
the behavior of DC motors, the students hook up an H-
bridge module that is supplied in the lab to a small
brushed DC motor. They then use a combination of
software that they write and libraries that are supplied to
explore PWM drive. As part of this exercise they observe
the drive waveforms to see for themselves the effects of
back emf, inductive kick-back and the effects of
suppression diodes.
To observe the behavior of stepper motors, the students
use a pre-built stepper motor drive circuit and a
combination of their own software and supplied pulse
libraries to drive a stepper motor. For this lab, a motor
drive voltage is specified that is well below optimum for
the stepper motor. This makes it particularly easy for the
students to observe the results of attempting to start in the
slew region or drive past the pull-out torque.
In these semi-structured laboratory assignments each
student builds hardware and writes software. They are,
however, encouraged to help one another in
understanding concepts and particularly in the debugging
process. This atmosphere of collaboration is openly
encouraged and serves to reduce the feeling that the
students are competing with one another for grades. The
collaborative atmosphere encouraged in the lab is
supported by the Russian learning theorist Lev
Vygotsky’s view of learning [2]. Vygotsky’s argument is
that knowledge is social before it is personal, which
suggests that it must be interactive and socially
constructed before it can be internalized and made
personal. The approach is further supported by the work
of Johnson et a1.[3] and Smith [4] showing that the
cooperative learning environment is conducive to
learning higher-order cognitive processes such as
synthesis and problem solving.
Upon completing these lab assignments, students have
gained experience in using the laboratory equipment and
have had an opportunity to observe for themselves many
of the behaviors discussed in the lectures. In addition,
they have gained experience using the course supplied
hardware and software modules that they will have
available to them when working on the project.
The Project
The scope of the projects that ME118 teams tackle is on
par with what was done in the last half of the second
quarter masters course a few years ago. This is possible
after only seven weeks of course content by giving
students tools and components that enable them to work
at a relatively high level of abstraction. This has been
facilitated by the development of both software and
hardware function modules. By using these higher level
tools, the students are able to concentrate on solving the
larger problem rather than spending all of their time
learning the details necessary to design every sub-system
from scratch. This is consistent with the trends in the
semiconductor and software industries, which have
focused on supplying larger scale problem solutions and
emphasizing re-usable software components.
T$e design of the project for each quarter’s class is one of
the important contributors to the success of the class. As
pointed out by Carryer [ 5 ] , there are many issues
involved in the design of these projects. The basic
requirement for all projects should be that they require
the integration of intelligence, electronics and mechanics
to achieve a product that could not be built otherwise.
This generally requires sensing the environment, signal
processing, decision making, and control of a physical
device. It is also important that the project be truly open-
ended, with no one obviously superior solution. Finally,
most people enjoy being recognized for their work. This
is especially true if they have just spent the last 48 hours
straight working on something. A public forum in which
to display their work is an effective way to add this to
projects.
Recent projects have been to build autonomous machines
to launch balls into baskets (March Madness), Putt golf
balls past a moving obstacle (Tiger’s Nightmare), knock
down soda can pins (Bowling for Scholars), and navigate
a maze-like course (Cab Fever).
Textbook
The text for the course is Horowitz & Hill’s The Art of
Electronics. This is supplemented by a selection of
readings on topics not well covered by H&H. The
readings are probably the weakest aspect of the course.
The Art of Electronics, despite being very accessible as
electronics texts go, still takes too much of an electrical
engineering view for most students. Many students report
590
that they find it difficult to learn the material from the
reading. The same students, several years removed from
the course, are likely to report (as many have) that they
find The Art of Electronics an excellent reference book.
Assessment
The credit for the course is focused heavily on the in-lab
activities. Laboratory reports provide a more or less
objective assessment of a student’s understanding of the
laboratory material. The project grading, while highly
subjective in the areas of concept and implementation, is
structured around an objective set of performance criteria.
The course has one exam, at midterm. The midterm
examination is a take-home exam with the students given
four days over which to work the exam. The exam, which
is also intended as a learning experience, emphasizes the
ability to apply the material and is designed to take 3-5
hours to work.
Iv THEIMPACT OF STUDENTBACKGROUND
The prerequisites for ME118 are E40 “Introductory
Electronics” and CS 106A “Programming Methodology”.
Typical ME undergraduates take both of these courses as
part of their engineering fundamentals requirements. The
relevant material from the introductory electronics course
includes Ohm’s law, Kirchoff‘s laws Thevenin’s
equivalents and the basic current vs. voltage
characteristics of the most common passive and
semiconductor devices. This material is then reviewed
during the first lecture and lab.
The programming methodology course at Stanford has
been taught in ‘C’ for a number of years now. This allows
ME1 18 to focus on the software structures associated
with event driven programming without having to teach
the syntax of ‘C’. The background provided by these
courses is an essential element in the ability to deliver a
meaningful mechatronics system integration experience
to students over the course of a single ten-week quarter.
v INTEGRATION WITHIN THE CURRICULUM
When it was originally introduced, ME118 was a purely
optional course, not fulfilling any graduation
requirements. Despite that fact, more than 15 students
(the lab capacity at that time) attempted to get in to every
offering. Since that time, the ME curriculum has
undergone a modification that now allows the selection of
two elective courses from a list of four. Other elective
courses that complement ME118 cover the topics of
sensors and feedback control. In order to try and meet
demand, the course has been offered twice a year for the
past three years. The laboratory has also been expanded
to allow up to 36 students in each class. This year, more
than half of the graduating undergraduate class will have
taken ME1 18 as one of their two electives.
 VI CONCLUSIONS
It is difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to find a
description of a mechatronics course that does not
involve laboratory work. A survey of papers on
mechatronics courses [6-191 all contain a laboratory
component. An innovative aspect of the laboratory
experiences in ME1 18 is that they are ‘integrative’. Most
of the laboratory experiences involve the student
integration of two or more disciplines (i.e. electronics +
software, electronics + software + mechanical). In this
way, the students not only reinforce the content material
gained from the lectures but are repeatedly required to
integrate this material into systems.
Another innovative element of the ME1 18 curriculum is
the use of software and hardware building blocks. Unlike
some approaches [9,11,19], the students in ME1 18 focus
on understanding at a level that will allow them to use
these building blocks to solve larger problems. Students
use the electronic building blocks, program exclusively in
a high-level language, and use software frameworks that
allow them to concentrate on the problem presented by
the project, rather than designing and building all of the
lowest level systems.
Judged by the reputation of the course among students,
the increasing enrollments in an elective course, and the
student course evaluations conducted by the school of
engineering (course value consistently rated in the top
few percent of all engineering courses), ME118 is a
success. This success shows that, with the appropriate
prerequisites, it is possible to structure a mechatronics
course around a meaningful integration experience and
produce a sense of empowerment and excitement in the
students.
Acknowledgements
The curriculum presented in this paper has been heavily
influenced by the constant feedback from the students in
these courses. Many of them have later volunteered time
to the courses as laboratory and project coaches and
contributed to the constant refinement of content and
delivery of the courses. Tom Kenny has co-taught the
course with me since its first offering and contributed
many good ideas to its development. National
Semiconductor, Motorola and Intel have been strong
supporters of the Smart Product Design Lab through
semiconductor and computer donations. Finally, the
initial development of this course at Stanford was funded
through the Synthesis Coalition of the National Science
Foundation.
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