ME218A: Smart Product Design Fundamentals
Overview:
ME218A is the first course in Stanford's graduate level Mechatronics series. In this course, you learn about transistors as switches, basic digital and analog circuits, operational amplifiers, comparators, software design, state machines, programming in C. You also get to apply that knowledge through four labs and a team course project.
Labs:
MCU used for all labs: TI's Tiva Launchpad, an ARM Cortex M4F evaluation board,
Lab 1 (Individual): Explored the behavior of transistors as switches and examined at what happens when you fail to get the devices turned fully on or off. Looked at the behavior in the region between fully on and off and examined the power losses in that region vs. being fully on/off.
Lab 2 (Individual): Applied knowledge of transistors and LEDs to create a low level IR signal source. Explored the behavior of two photo-transistor circuits in detecting and amplifying the signal detected from your IR source. Square up an analog signal to produce a digital result with a designed Schmitt trigger .
Lab 3 (Individual): Developed a module to interface the microcontroller to a small LCD display. Wrote C code to manipulate the microcontroller's I/O lines to communicate with the LCD display. Wrapped code with a set of interface routines that provide access to the LCD display while hiding the complexity of the details necessary to make the display work.
Lab 4 (Individual): Developed the electronics, hardware and software complete application to read an IR LED transmitting Morse code,.decode it, and have the message scrolling across the LCD screen.
Team Project:
Please see the link at the bottom of the page for even more information including electrical schematics, code, and pictures.
The goal of the project was to create an interactive arcade machine that which with a water theme. The machine was required to have:
- three types of user input (one being an analog input and another being a non-contact input)
- Have some sort of large scale motion
- Have a creative passage of time
- Give audio/haptic/tactile feedback
- Fit a 18"x18"x36" footprint
- Have a welcoming mode and celebration mode for before/after use
As a team, we wanted to create our users to have fun first and foremost. So we mashed up guitar hero, Mad Max, and driving/shooting to create "Mad Max Aqua Road." My role was designing and implementing the state machines controlling the program flow, hardware bring up and abstracted interface for hardware, guitar reverse engineering, LED marquee control, and UI/UX design. An example of my hardware initialization and abstraction for a shift register can be seen below.
ME218A is the first course in Stanford's graduate level Mechatronics series. In this course, you learn about transistors as switches, basic digital and analog circuits, operational amplifiers, comparators, software design, state machines, programming in C. You also get to apply that knowledge through four labs and a team course project.
Labs:
MCU used for all labs: TI's Tiva Launchpad, an ARM Cortex M4F evaluation board,
Lab 1 (Individual): Explored the behavior of transistors as switches and examined at what happens when you fail to get the devices turned fully on or off. Looked at the behavior in the region between fully on and off and examined the power losses in that region vs. being fully on/off.
Lab 2 (Individual): Applied knowledge of transistors and LEDs to create a low level IR signal source. Explored the behavior of two photo-transistor circuits in detecting and amplifying the signal detected from your IR source. Square up an analog signal to produce a digital result with a designed Schmitt trigger .
Lab 3 (Individual): Developed a module to interface the microcontroller to a small LCD display. Wrote C code to manipulate the microcontroller's I/O lines to communicate with the LCD display. Wrapped code with a set of interface routines that provide access to the LCD display while hiding the complexity of the details necessary to make the display work.
Lab 4 (Individual): Developed the electronics, hardware and software complete application to read an IR LED transmitting Morse code,.decode it, and have the message scrolling across the LCD screen.
Team Project:
Please see the link at the bottom of the page for even more information including electrical schematics, code, and pictures.
The goal of the project was to create an interactive arcade machine that which with a water theme. The machine was required to have:
- three types of user input (one being an analog input and another being a non-contact input)
- Have some sort of large scale motion
- Have a creative passage of time
- Give audio/haptic/tactile feedback
- Fit a 18"x18"x36" footprint
- Have a welcoming mode and celebration mode for before/after use
As a team, we wanted to create our users to have fun first and foremost. So we mashed up guitar hero, Mad Max, and driving/shooting to create "Mad Max Aqua Road." My role was designing and implementing the state machines controlling the program flow, hardware bring up and abstracted interface for hardware, guitar reverse engineering, LED marquee control, and UI/UX design. An example of my hardware initialization and abstraction for a shift register can be seen below.