I was assigned to redesign the Advanced Mechatronics course. The goal was to move beyond a purely Arduino-based curriculum and introduce skills that students would likely need as mechatronics engineers. I structured the class around a hierarchical control system where students programmed a Raspberry Pi to communicate with an AStar 32U4 microcontroller via UART. The Raspberry Pi sent commands to control the robots' actuators, while the AStar returned sensor data for processing and decision-making.

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The students' state machines ran on the Raspberry Pi, while their actuator control code executed on the AStar. Through this setup, students gained experience with serial data communication, Linux, Git, Raspberry Pi programming, Python, and C++. I developed the codebase that formed the foundation for half of their lab assignments and final projects. The attached videos demonstrate me calibrating a line-following sensor and testing an obstacle-avoidance finite state machine (FSM) using bump sensors.