An introduction on how to use this website
Welcome to SimplTronics and the wonderful world that is mechatronics! To help you on your mechatronical journey, we've created this website to guide you through the basic steps of mechatronics, with the purpose of giving you the tools, resources and knowledge so that you yourself can start creating your own awesome mechatronical projects.
Generally you will find three things on this website:
- An interactive and modular programming tool
- A set of guides and introductions that will help you understand and better your mechatronical skills
- A Wikipedia that explains terms used in mechatronics in detail
In the following sections we will quickly go through how these three aspects are intended to be used, and how best to utilize the website.
The interactive and modular programming tool
The interactive programming tool is the main helping tool when it comes to generating easy-to-understand code examples. What the tools does is to help create a connection between mechatronical components by keeping track of the Pin-configuration, giving basic helpful comments, and suggesting ways of creating a connection between components. An example of how the tool could be used can be seen in the GIF below.
Here, the user first adds a button that is connected to the Arduino's pin 8. Afterwards, an LED module is included, and the previously included button get's chosen as the 'trigger' for LED. In this way, when the button is pressed, the LED will light up. Lastly, the button gets renamed from "MyButton" to "LEDButton" which automatically gets updated in the code.
The tool is made to help you get a feel for how Arduino code is setup with different components, so that you can take inspiration from these simple examples.
You can read more about the tool and try it out by clicking the button below!
Click here to go to the interactive tool!
Guides and introduction
The second part of the website is consisting of a set of introductions and guides to help you get started with mechatronics. Starting with the introductions, you'll get to learn more about the different tools, websites and resources we recommend beginners to use. In addition to this, the introductions also introduces creative thinking when it comes to the , encouraging the user to think 'outside the box'. The guides serves as inspirational projects that you can choose to follow to get inspired, or to simply better your skills within mechatronics. Additionally, you can use the guides filter function to search for guides via function keywords or goals, such as I want to move something or I want to communicate information to user.
You can find the guides and introductions in the tab at the top.
An example of how a guide could look
The Wiki
Lastly, the website consists of our own simple Wikipedia-style encyclopedia in which a lot of the mechatronical terms has been explained. Instead of having long, text-heavy guides explaining each and every component/term that is used, we instead keep it simple, creating a link between the terms and the wiki, so that if you would like to know more, you can simply click the link to the wiki.
With the launch of the website, it is our goal to provide the users with the basic information we believe beginners would need from the wiki, however, as the user base might grow, so should the wiki. For this reason, we intent to let users, such as yourself contribute to the wiki in the future. Both in terms of knowledge on existing components, but also add new components not yet mapped in the wiki.
You can start exploring the wiki by following the link below.
What now?
What do you mean what now? Go start this incredible mechatronical journey! If you have no idea of where to start, go take a look at the guides to get some inspiration. If you're looking for a specific function, you'll be able to sort the guides after your requirements, such as I want to sense something. Aditionally you can read through some of the other introductions such as or .