Mechatronics: Principles and Applications

Sept. 14, 2006

By Godfrey C. Onwubolu
ISBN: 0750663790

Motor control is one of those wonderful digital/analog topics that has become more important in embedded development with the increase in microcontrollers targeted at this space as well as a competitive demand for more sophisticated solutions. Onwubolu’ Mechatronics: Principles and Applications does an excellent job of presenting the basics as well as advanced topics in this area. Anyone working in this area should have the book on their shelf.

The author starts out with a number of introduction chapters covering topics such as analog and digital circuits capping it off with a discussion of Microchip’s PIC16F84 microcontroller. The chapters move on to data acquisition and sensors. Things get interesting with an extensive discussion of actuators and interfacing to microcontrollers.

The book covers control theory and more advanced control interfaces. An entire chapter is dedicated to robotics. There is a short chapter on circuit board manufacture and another on reliability.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.