Mechanical CAD Software
What is CAD software used for?
Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) software is used to capture and simulate designs electronically. It is commonly used for electrical or mechanical designs.
Patents 101
What is a patent?
- “A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office” (for more information, see General Information Concerning Patents from the USPTO).
- Patents are the most common way of protecting intellectual property that is physically tangible (e.g., projects you might do in our engineering program).
What is a trademark?
- “A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others” (for more information, see What is a Trademark or Servicemark? from the USPTO).
- Trademarks are typically used to protect a unique name for a product, but not the product itself. For example, Dr. Jordan’s engineering education research lab is called STEAM Labsâ„¢.
What is a copyright?
- “Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of ‘original works of authorship’ including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished” (for more information, see What is a Copyright? from the USPTO).
- As a student, you automatically own the copyright for any text that you write (e.g., your project reports). However, copyrights are typically not used to protect engineering designs.
Why do I need to search for patents?
If you knowingly or unknowingly use intellectual property that is patented by someone else in your own commercial designs, you may become the target of lawsuits from the patent owner. Therefore, when designing new products it is best to search for the patents you may be infringing upon (either through the product as a whole or particular features, such as a touch display) so that you can either design around the patents or reach out to the patent owner to license the patent.
PCB design checklist
Before exporting your PCB design for fabrication, you **must **verify the design and fix any errors. Time invested verifying your design before manufacturing will make the assembly and testing process significantly easier.
Peralta 103 Resources
What equipment is available at each of the benches?
Function Generator (5 MHz)
Recreating a simple round padstack
Recreating a simple round padstack
This tutorial takes you through recreating a basic round thru-hole padstack.
Report Formatting Instructions
Introduction
Formatting is important. It makes documents more legible and helps direct the reader to more easily find the information they want, through consistency of styling and predictable flow.
Software design
What is a finite state machine?
A finite state machine (FSM) is a way of modeling a system such that there are a limited number of finite “states” that a system can be in, and that it can only be in one of those states at a time. Events (e.g., pushing a button) cause the system to change from one state to the next. Unexpected events do not cause the system to change states, which is useful for ignoring spurious inputs. Rather than coding for every possible input, you can instead code only for inputs that matter at the given time. The following resources provide a solid conceptual framing and implementation examples:
