PI: Will Saunders, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Project Goals or Needs Addressed: "A lot of the old functions of electrical engineers really are being taken over by mechanical engineers, motors and analog design, but it’s not just analog design, its this idea that with the advent of digital processing chips and micro controllers and things like that, every product and every process has become somewhat digital. It really addressed the need to get mechanical engineers more diverse in their design, more comfortable with hands on work especially related to electronics right because a lot of mechanical engineers will stay away from the electrical side."
Project Grants and Expenditures: $18,000 (year 8), $17,000 (year 9), equipment, programmer wages, faculty wages



Mechatronics at Virginia Tech
(Web site)

March 1999 project proposal
(PDF file)

April-September 2000 Succeed progress report
(PDF file)
 


A mechatronics curriculum was created for seniors as a technical elective. To facilitate vertical integration, some of the course principles were integrated into a new, sophomore-level design course, ME 2024. A Web site was generated discussing mechatronics design principles for these students. Equipment called the "VT Project Box" with a mounted "VT 84 board" was created along with software called the pic-visual developer. Sophomore-level students use the "drag and drop" software "…to use block names like add, divide, multiply, analog to digital conversion to create software that runs on this board." Students did not assemble the five boxes, but rather, used the software to manipulate the "VT 84 Board."