Junior Keystone Course

In this course, teams design, build, and perfect a pick-and-place machine. At this point in their education, they are experienced in working efficiently as a multidisciplinary engineering team and will apply their academic knowledge to their practical experience to make an engineering model, prototype, and first article pick-and-place machine. Through their standard academic courses, the electricals will know enough to use closed loop PID control while the mechanicals use their training to make a quick-moving, properly damped machine. They will leverage significant hardware resources, including everything from their first two machines, vacuum chucks, vision control, and sophisticated software. Once the machine is operational, the students learn about manufacturability and redesign their PCB using learned design techniques and other practical Design For Manufacturing (DFM) philosophies.

Students will then use the machine to fabricate a PCB and pick-and-place its components. Additional sub-projects incorporate topics from other classes, such as Control Theory, to provide a practical complement to their current coursework. For example, they will design a controller and modify an inexpensive toaster oven into a functional IR reflow oven to reflow the parts pick-and-placed by their new machine. These machines are also used in future courses.

This course also provides a practical introduction to topics such as thermodynamics, machine vision, embedded programming, and control systems, before, during, and after they take the formal classes on these subjects. When they take these classes, they will know and appreciate why they're learning this difficult material – one of the key needs identified by our focus groups with students and employers.

This course focuses on advanced system design, product development, and manufacturability. The students will:

• Employ advanced mechanics, electronics, and embedded control techniques.

• Learn and apply design in electronics, machine vision, pattern recognition, pneumatic, and thermodynamics

• Demonstrate comprehensive project management skills

• Conduct design reviews attended by alumni and professional design engineers

Summary: What’s in this for you?

In this third course you will learn how to design, build, test, and perfect an advanced machine using advanced engineering design tools and techniques. You’ll learn about manufacturing and how work outside your engineering team. You’ll start creating really cool things to show your friends and take to job interviews. And you’ll build a pretty sweet Pick and Place machine to automate making your prototypes.