Building Of Smart Systems Using Mechatronic Engineering: A Case Study Of „Smart Door‟ System

Abstract

Often, Mechanical, Electrical and Software Engineers in many companies live and work from different locations. In some cases, they may be in the same building or the same office but live in different worlds, speaking different languages and therefore, cannot effectively communicate with one other when it comes to product design or problem solving; simply because they come from different backgrounds knowing very little about other disciplines. For instance, when the Mechanical Engineers design a system, they pass it over to the Electrical/Electronic Engineers to design and fit the control system and they in turn roll it over to the Software Engineers to write the control program. This serial and disjointed engineering practice results in producing and un-optimized product or solution. To overcome these difficulties, Mechatronics evolved as a trans-disciplinary approach to solving engineering problems based on open communication systems and concurrent practices, to design better engineering products. This paper describes the building of smart systems using mechatronics command set; the Flowcode programming software was used in coding instruction into the PIC Microprocessor 16F877A.