These initial remarks are directed to the lecturer or examiner of a course on
mechatronics. The experiment instructions that follow can be used as course
notes for the students.

Practical laboratory experience is an essential ingredient for linking
together the diverse aspects of mechatronics. But it is necessary to choose
among a wealth of alternatives when selecting and designing experiments.

Numerous experiments are available on the market, but they are usually
very costly. Much worse, many of them require very little creativity or
understanding on the part of the student, consisting instead of a ritual of knob
turning, measurement, and graph plotting.

In the experiments that follow, the students are required to create software
from scratch, not just by dragging icons in a Graphic User Interface. They
add hardware by connecting circuits that they could easily replicate from
component level—indeed, an able technician should have no difficulty in
fabricating these experiments from catalog components.

There is, however, the problem of the choice of computing platform.

When mechatronics ability comes to be applied by the graduated student,
will it be to use a PC for control and coordination tasks, or will the objective
be a mechatronic product with an embedded microcomputer? Should the
software lean toward the latest version of the .NET environment, or should
it be based on downloading the simplest code to a single chip?

An embeddable chip such as the HC12 certainly has all the input–output
capability and the computing power to control any of the experiments here.
It has numerous ADCs and output pins, with an abundance of program
memory. But its “user interface” is limited, to say the least. It will need to be
linked via its RS232 serial capability to a PC (or its equivalent) on which the
student can write, edit, save and then compile or assemble the software. The
link will also be needed to upload data for display or plotting.