Resources
This page contains oodles of resources to refer to in the area of electrical and mechatronics design, as well as social innovation. It’s important to understand the technical engineering concepts in detail, but it’s equally important to understand the socioeconomic contexts in which we work. We try to combine resources from both here.
Engineering Resources
Mechanical Design
FUNdaMENTALs of Design by Alex Slocum ↗ is an amazing textbook on precision design and the engineering design process especially for mechanical systems, power transmission, and complex machines.
Electronics Design & Scaling
The Art + Science of PCB Design ↗ is an IAP course about designing circuit boards. All the course content is freely avaliable online.
Practical Electronics for Inventors ↗ is an amazing book on the basics of electrical design. It’s a great reference to have handy for how ANY electrical component works!
Software + Hardware for Students
Wokwi ↗ is a simulator for IoT systems. You can use the examples but also connect custom components and see if they’ll work before you build them!
LTSpice ↗ is a free circuit simulator that lets you test both logic and power circuits. It’s pretty accurate and can even handle nonlinearities.
KiCAD ↗ is a free multi-platform PCB design software. Altium Designer ↗ is a more industry-oriented tool for PCB design but only runs on Windows.
Arduino IoT Cloud ↗ is the software we will use in this class. But there are other softwares including Blynk ↗ and IFTTT ↗ that provide different functionalities and plans for different things!
It’s worth also looking past Arduino to the ESP32 ↗ platform which is also uniquely designed for IoT, as well as the Arduino Pro ↗ boards for more robust hardware for harsher environments.
International & Sustainable Development Resources
Both the UN SDGs ↗ and the 2023 Report on the Goals ↗ are great places to start when seeking to understand the problems underserved communities face, and our progress towards solving them.
The International Energy Agency’s Net-Zero by 2050 Report ↗ contains plans and paths to decarbonize the global energy sector by the year 2050 by combining both technical and socioeconomic contexts. Awareness of where the energy sector is headed, and the key technologies that will allow us to decarbonize is critical to implementing sustinable solutions in developing countries.
Education / Teaching Resources
Make it Stick ↗ is a great book on the science of learning and how we learn. Many of the ideas it presents were used to structure this course, and can be very useful especially when developing educational programs in developing contexts.
The Impact Rankings from Times Higher Education ↗ rank a university’s contributions to the sustinable development goals, and their full 2023 methodology is also avaliable ↗. Resources like this can help us increase awareness of what we can be doing on campus to further our contributions to the SDGs.