Hey y’all 👋🌊 I’m Arren and I’m super excited to welcome you to the Mechatronics Blog for 2025! Picking your spec can be a superrrr intimidating task, so I’m here to lighten your load and pull back the curtain on the elusive world of mechatronics. Over the next semester, I’ll be talking about different courses, why I picked tron, career paths, the differences between mechanical and mechatronics, uni advice, and everything you need to know about tron to help you pick your spec – so buckle your seatbelts and hold on tight cus picking your spec is a bumpy, but necessary, ride 🎢.
A little bit about me:
- There’s a high chance you’ll see me around the engineering building because I’m at uni for 10 hours a day, 5 days a week (most of that time is spent yapping and going on side quests) ☕
- I licked four batteries last semester ⚡
- My favourite engineering scenario is a beam of negligible mass at rest, in equilibrium, with no external forces acting on it 📐
Now tell me something about you! Feel free to comment your name, what you love about engineering, and those little numbers on your debit card!!
Now that we have become well acquainted (basically best friends), let’s dive into the world of mechatronics. We will start off small, looking less than a year ahead. Say you’re in a lecture theatre in March of 2026 and the lecturer says: “Welcome to mechatronics”. What then? What does your semester look like? Will you enjoy it? I think you would want to know exactly what you are getting into. I want to paint a rather detailed picture of each course – complete with lecture styles, skills, projects, vibes, and software. This way, you can genuinely imagine yourself taking these classes and figure out if semester 1 of mechatronics feels right for you.
MECHENG 235 – Design and Manufacture 1
If you think building things from cardboard in ENGGEN 115 is fun, then MECHENG 235 is the class for you. This course has gone through some BIG changes this year. As of 2025, MECHENG 235 consists of: one semester-long group project and a few short and straightforward quizzes. That’s it. NO tests or exam. Is this not the dream? As if it couldn’t get any better, the group project is making a robot.
COURSE STYLE
CONTENT TAUGHT
- One weekly lecture and one 3-4 hour tutorial session for your group project
- The lecturer, Olaf, is super charismatic, and the TAs are all genuinely super helpful
- The semester ends with a competition demonstrating everyone’s robots (and no they can’t hold a robot fighting competition – we asked) 🏆
- The lectures cover engineering design, manufacturing processes, and mechanical and electrical tools/components
- It’s a very hands-on course, so a lot of your learning will also be practical experience building a prototype and working with electronic components via the group project
PROJECTS
SOFTWARE/HARD SKILLS LEARNT
- In a group of around four people (you pick your group members), you will ideate concepts, build prototypes, and demonstrate a working final prototype of a robot that meets a brief (Warman Competition-style)
- For our year, we had to build a robot that collected two ‘seeds’ (tennis balls) at different heights and dropped them into an incinerator (hole)
- Autodesk Inventor
- Arduino programming
- 3D printing
- Laser cutting
- Soldering
- Using electronic components (DC motors, servomotors, IR sensors, ultrasonic sensors, voltage regulators, etc)
Guys, I genuinely love this course. In previous years, the group project was only half of the semester. Students would design their robot solution, but didn’t have to build it. They must have realised that sounds pretty boring because the course as it is now is SOOO much more fun. Don’t worry if you have little programming, robotics, or electronics experience – I know I had none. It’s daunting, but this project will prove that growth really does happen outside your comfort zone. Is building a robot hard? Yes. Is it stress-inducing? Yes. But so is giving birth. And seeing your creation open its (ultrasonic) eyes and move its little feet (laser cut wheels) makes all the pain go away 🤖.
Here’s a snippet of our robot on the final day of the semester. If this type of thing interests you, mechatronics is the place to be!
MECHENG 201 – Introduction to Mechatronics
Good news: you get to pick a mech/tron elective in second year!! Confusing news: you have no choice because there’s only one approved elective!! I’d say this course is ¼ control systems ⚙️, ¼ programming 💻, ¼ electrical 💡, and ¼ computer systems 💾.
COURSE STYLE
CONTENT TAUGHT
- Three lectures a week and two weekly labs where you work on course projects
- Robotics programming, control systems, electronics, sensors, actuators, filters, and digital systems 🦾
PROJECTS
SOFTWARE/HARD SKILLS LEARNT
- You will use your coding skills to program a VEX robot to complete a task, and then pair up with someone else in your lab to program a VEX robot to pick up a small payload and navigate a course 🧑💻
- Your second (smaller) project will be designing concepts for a smart home system
- Robot programming (using C)
This course will definitely resonate with you if you want to take mechatronics to dive into the control systems, automation, robotics, software, and electrical worlds – but if that isn’t your style, then this next course might be for you.
MECHENG 242 – Mechanics of Materials 1
Do you ever cry yourself to sleep? On an unrelated note, here is a class that combines the statics section from ENGGEN 121 with the stress and strain section from CHEMMAT 121.
The first two mech courses are very practical and hands-on, so this course will give you some breathing space in the first semester when your project deadlines start kicking in (but don’t let those deadlines distract you from the study aid problems that you should consistently be practicing for this course). Pictured: photoelastic changes in a transparent object due to stress #engineer #tonystark
COURSE STYLE
CONTENT TAUGHT
- Three try not to fall asleep challenges a week and an optional weekly tutorial to ask TAs for help on practice questions
- Two simple and short labs throughout the semester
- The course is basically pure theory
- The lecturers cover content very slowly and in depth
- Deformation of materials (lots of it)
- Stress (how to analyse it and how to feel it 😭)
PROJECTS
SOFTWARE/HARD SKILLS LEARNT
- No projects for this course, just the two labs :((
- Maybe the real software and hard skills learnt were the friends and theoretical knowledge we gained along the way ☀️
ENGSCI 211 – Mathematical Modelling 2
All PII engineers take MM2, and it hasn’t changed significantly, so there is a plethora of information on it in past blogs!
Bonus: ENGGEN 299 ⚙️
Every part II engineering student will complete a few practical workshop sessions where they will create components and build a functioning motor. The cool part of being a mechanical, mechatronics, or biomedical engineering student is that you will do an additional three workshops creating parts for a metal tic-tac-toe board.
Workshops:
- 3D printing (printing motor components)
- Laser cutting (cutting an acrylic cover)
- Soldering (wiring the electrical components)
- Motor building (assembling your motor at UoA’s Newmarket campus)
The bonus workshops you will do as a mech/tron/bme student:
- Milling (cutting metal cubes into a playing piece)
- Welding (welding the playing platform)
- Turning (turning metal cylinders into playing pieces)
…And that about sums up what your first semester of mechatronics engineering would look like. Designing and building robots, programming real robots, stress analysis, stressing out, and all those gnarly 🐈👁️ things.
If you:
- Like the hands-on group projects of ENGGEN 115
- Want to engage in both the digital/electronic and applied physics sides of engineering
- Like all of your part 1 courses (especially ENGGEN 115, ENGGEN 121, CHEMMAT 121, and ENGGEN 13)
- Want to do mechanical, electrical, computer systems, and software engineering, but don’t want to pick just one
Then mechatronics (and mechanical, since we share 7 out of 8 part II courses) engineering might be the course for you!
Understanding context and seeing the bigger picture are always important. In part III, the course gears more towards the ECSE (electrical, computer, and software engineering) side of engineering – something that might excite some of you, and scare others off. My next blog will widen the lens and take a broader look at mechatronics. The pros, the cons, the career opportunities, and why I decided to pick mechatronics. I’ll see you there 👋🌊