Teaching embedded programming concepts to mechanical engineering students

While the prerequisites to mechatronics courses often include a programming course, students are rarely prepared to deal with writing software for an embedded microcontroller. In typical introductory programming courses students write programs to run on relatively large computers with no mechanism for direct interaction with the hardware or real world This paper describes the elements of Stanford's undergraduate mechatronics courses that are used to introduce students to programming on an embedded microcontroller directly connected to a simple autonomous mobile platform. The philosophy behind the approaches taken, the content of the lectures preceding the laboratory assignment, the, assignment itself, the software framework provided as well as the physical platform are discussed.