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I present to you, the results of Principles of Engineering.

Principles of Engineering (PoE) is an introductory level mechatronics class at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. The class is structured around using PIC microcontrollers to build simple devices. PoE is structured such that students teach themselves through three structured investigative labs. Then, students design and develop an independent project in small groups based on the labs and research. Class time is dedicated to working on labs and the project. Instead of standard introductory engineering lectures, students are responsible for using the tools available to investigate problems themselves, utilizing the professor as a resource.

The project itself is done in small groups of students, between two and six. Teams decide on a project with nontrivial mechanical and electrical components and then work to completely it over the course of 2 months. Students interface a PIC18F2455 microcontroller with some new device of their choice as a fourth lab report for usage in future projects, and generally use this experience in their final deliverable.

Team SAGE decided to develop a camera pan-tilt mechanism. The device was designed such that a user can place any camera or video camera onto a mount which attachs to a tripod. The mount contains servos which allow rotation along two different axes such that the camera can turn azimuthally and longitudinally. The user can input angular values using buttons and a serial LCD display. Using the LCD as a display, users communicate with the PIC microcontroller, which in turn communicates with the servos.

This project can be outlined into three main components:

1. The mechanical design to allow for any camera to be placed in the mount, and for the camera to turn freely.
2. The electronics allowing interfacing of the PIC, serial LCD, and servos.
3. The software facilitating all communication between devices.

Read more on our project website. Also, it’s a great place to go if you want to read a tutorial whitepaper with sample code but isn’t quote a library about interfacing a Sparkfun SerLCD serial LCD display with a PIC microcontroller in C. Go go keyword dropping!

All in all, the project came our pretty well, although if we had another week we’d have made our final prototype work instead of using our alpha prototype.