Mechatronics Components: Arduino Uno, 12c LCD Display, RAMPS 1.4

Mechatronics 1
MECHATRONICS COMPONENTS
By Name
Course
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Institution
Location
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INTRODUCTION
This research paper seeks to describe the following mechatronic components, namely, Arduino
Uno, 12c LCD display, RAMPS 1.4, Arduino Mega 2560 board, 12864 LCD Controller, Power
Supply 12V, Connect Motors, Thermistors, E3D v6 Hotend and Heatbed, Fan, and steeper motor
by analyzing how they operate.
Arduino Uno
Arduino Uno is a special type of Arduino with the through-hole ATmega328 and is the first to
use the Atmel ATmegaxU2 rather than FTDI USB to serial chip. Arduino Uno has 6 analog
inputs and 14 digital I/O pins. There are 6 digital pins that can be used for output of PWM. The
figure below shows the hardware components in Arduino Uno:
Figure 1: Arduino Uno (Anon., 2019)
The design of the board above use numerous controllers and microprocessors and is equipped
with sets of analog and digital I/O pins which may be interfaced to other circuits and various
expansion boards. In the component above, there is the power system, which selects between the
USB power and power jack and produces 3v3 and 5V for the entire system. There is also a USB

Mechatronics 3
to serial controller which contains the bootloader that is used in loading programs into the
ATMEGA328P (Anon., 2019).
Power System
In case the power supply is connected to the power jack, then the supplied power will be between
15V and 9V. The two chips are the voltage regulators that generates 5V supply.
The Vin is connected directly to the power supply. LM385D chip is connected to the Vin, the
chip which contains two operational amplifiers. One of the op-amps is not used at all and the
other one is used as a comparator. Vin/2 is compared to 3V3 and if 3V3 is less than Vin/2, then
the output is 5V and that is used in turning off the supply from the USB.
USB Controller
This component of Arduino Uno is used in loading the code into ATMEGA328P and is
implemented with ATMEGA8U2-MU. The main controller is the ATMEGA328P and this is
where the written code is executed and is connected directly to the I/O pins.
12C LCD Display
The integration of an LCD display enables interactivity of the developed project, permitting the
operator to read directly the parameters of the output. These values can either be numerical
values or simple text read by sensors, such as number of cycles that the Arduino is performing,
pressure or even temperature.