Gadgetry 101

Gadgetry 101 is a course that I co-teach through the Carnegie Mellon student college*. In the course, students learn the necessary steps to create an electro-mechanical gadget.

We cover basic sensing and actuation devices, and have students develop a preliminary idea of what they want their gadget to do. We then teach students how to use Eagle CAD, a software package for developing circuit boards. We provide some basic building blocks - for example, the circuits for the voltage regulator and microcontroller are provided to the students. The students learn to make the schematic, and create a PCB layout. We send off the layout files to be fabricated, and when they return the students solder them together. We then spend the last couple of weeks of the course on programming the gadgets.

We do all this in 14 1.5 hour sessions and assume no prior knowledge/skills on the part of the students. Even so, almost all of our students end up with an operating gadget at the end of the course. In our opinion, the key to this success is providing proper scaffolding and limits for the students - for example, all the students are required to use the same microcontroller, such that they can use a software library we created which eliminates some of the arcane parts of programming 8-bit microcontrollers.

We've now taught the course two times, and are planning to teach it again this fall. About 25 students have completed the class, creating such outlandish gadgets as a head-wah (a replacement for a wah pedal), an altitude tripped servo, a controller for an electric skateboard, a weather node with crazy LED displays, a Simon game, a Carnival booth game, and many more.

We have a website with some of out-of-date information at: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/tlauwers/gadgetry/ Email me at tlauwers at gmail if you're interested in arranging something similar elsewhere. We think this class could be taught to advanced high school or college students.

• • The student college allows students to propose classes to teach, and other students can take these classes for a small amount of credit. Fun with Robots (which I previously posted about) is one such class.

Posted 1 week ago by tlauwers

Tagged with: class curriculum electronics gadget gadgetry

Readers' comments

Video of head-wah officially requested! Posted 1 week ago by illah

Add a comment

Log in to post a comment. Not a member? Join now!