Background

This quarter I took a class ME210 – Introduction to Mechatronics. It was a 7 week crash-course on the basic electronics needed to build a simple robot, and then 3 weeks of building a robot for competition. An introduction to this year’s game, Botcoin Bonanza, is in the video below (check out my/my robot’s cameo at 0:40):

And here are some videos of our robot specifically:

For those who can’t watch videos right now, the game consisted of pressing buttons to get coins out of a box and depositing said coins on the other side of the field. To learn more about the game and our robot, go to our team website at bitbot8.weebly.com (our team name is Ron Paul 2012 for the meme of it).

My role

My role on the team was primarily programming as well as quite a bit of electronics. I designed circuits for all the different uses of op-amps, learned how to filter signals with hardware, and – most importantly – I now know how to read data sheets 😂. This class really exposed me to electronics, and I found it a lot of fun.

Mentoring my high school robotics team

But I’m still a software geek at heart – in class we also learned the very nifty finite state machine architecture for event-based programming. While I was exclaiming over how amazing it was, my teammates laughed and rolled their eyes. That was fine though, because after using it extensively in our robot and figuring out all its tricks, I reached out to my old high school robotics team to teach them about this new framework.

After taking them through an example, I gave them a problem (design an FSM for a garage), and let them at it. The programmers on the team completely geeked out over it. I don’t think I’ve never seen a bunch of high schoolers so engrossed in a single problem. It was really fun to see the lights turn on in their brains. It reminded me of myself when I was still on the team :)

Reflections

Well, to wrap things up I just want to say that this class was my foray into the maker space, and inspired me to buy my own Arduino (Leonardo!). And while I didn’t do too much in the mechanical/manufacturing side, it definitely opened eyes to lasercutting, milling, and all the other things the Product Realization Lab on campus can do. I’m on the lookout for more projects like this in the future. Any opportunity to build mechatronics is a good one to me!