Ed Carryer

Stanford's Smart Product Design Laboratory (SPDL) is home to the Mechatronics courses in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. These courses (ME218a,b,c,d at the Masters level, and ME210 at the undergraduate level) have been developed over the past 30 years with the principal goal of integrating the knowledge gained in the classes into real artifacts. While each of these courses meets for four hours of lecture a week, the real learning goes on in the laboratory. A mixture of individual laboratory assignments and team projects help the students take command of the material as they integrate it into their own designs. Each year, new projects are designed for each class that incorporate the pedagogical goals of the particular course, while paying close attention to the public venues in which the projects are presented. As a result, many of the projects have a whimsical nature that helps make the difficult and time-consuming engineering tasks a bit more fun.

For ME218a in the fall quarter, the two-week projects emphasize the decision making abilities of the embedded microcontroller taking relatively simple inputs and creating simple outputs. Recent project themes have included The Mechatronic Penny Arcade, Ancient Technology and Ridiculous Interactions, (alternative user input devices to play a vintage game console) and the ME218 Zoo. By the winter quarter, the students on the ME218b teams take three weeks to tackle more complex problems with more elaborate inputs and outputs. The projects in this quarter are typically "little machines that run around on the floor and interact to play a game." The sensing of the field, opposing player and game state is coupled with the more complex decisions necessary to implement a game playing strategy. Recent titles have been SPDLHL Shootout (with a hockey theme), Teeter-Totter-Tug-o'-War, and Pie Sumo. In ME218c the students spend five weeks bringing together not simply one but multiple microcontrollers and class-wide communications (often wireless) with themes such as The Terman Pond Flotilla, Tele-Operated Rolling User Propelled Stools, and The Battle for the Atlantic. In the final quarter of the ME218 sequence, ME218d, student teams work with an industrial partner to prototype a mechatronic solution to the partner's design challenge. Recent partners have included Industrial Light and Magic, BMW and NASA. In ME210 in the Winter Quarter, teams of undergraduates tackle projects with themes such as March Madness and Tiger's Revenge.