Just what is Mechatronics Engineering? So many people ask when I told them the course that I am taking. Well, its something along the line of combining Mechanical and Electronics engineering…. the art of digitally controlled mechanical action?
Thru my 3 trimesters, I definitely learn that the line between Mechanical and Electronics encompasses a lot of stuff, but it was a lot of fun. 1st of all, I got to know about the Arduino prototyping. Back when I was in the technical school 25 years ago, before the time of personal computers and firmware burn in boards, we could only do hardware programming and testing in the school’s lab. At that time, only serious (boring) educational projects were allowed. With Arduino and laptops, everybody can build their fun pet projects and build robots! Yeah!
So what can I do with this Arduino thingy? Lots of things that are already described by so many programmers out there, so in my blog, I will only mention some of the small innovative uses that I come up with. And I will not be going into the implementation details, as I am only trying to explain the concept.
Lets start with a single pushbutton that is meant for powering up and powering down a device. Note, the simplest method of this action is a on/off switch. But hey, I like to solve complicated problems to achieve a desired look or features. In this particular case, the pushbutton is for powering up a Smart White Cane, meaning it will be operated by the visually handicapped. These are the pushbutton features that I decided to want for my project:
- Must avoid accidental push on or off – therefore push and hold for 2 seconds, beep at every 0.5 second interval in this mode, so that user knows that device will turn on / off after 4 beeps. Play a low tone beep if the user abort this before 2 seconds.
- Play a on tune when turning on, and off tune when turning off.
The Smart White cane prototype with recessed blue pushbutton
Back to the question of what is Mechatronics. In this example, the pushbutton is a simple mechanical device that makes a momentary contact when pushed. When it is paired with a Arduino board, some intelligence can be introduced and that makes the pushbutton part of a bigger Smart device. Therefore the key to using Mechatronics is hardware programming to produce a precise and specific response to any generic mechanical parts in a system.
Anyway, its hard to explain that hardware programming is really software programming too…. so my simple explanation is a software program that is uploaded into a programmable chip to become “firmware”. During testing, the prototype creator can make changes to the firmware to get the sequence or timing just right. In this case, the buzzer is also controlled by the Arduino and I was able to fine tune all the sounds and the counter duration until I felt it was just right. 🙂
Link to my testing video at https://youtu.be/Wnkk0u7Tthg
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