Mechatronics Engineering: Part 1

Bismillah

Ho yeahh.. this is probably my first written blog post. Okey the topic for today is the course that I'm doing in Uni.

I'm currently taking this degree in The University of Sheffield and I'm currently in the process of going into 2nd year. Alhamdulillah my 1st year results are good. I really hope my performance would continue for the rest of my uni years. So... I've been asked by many people a lot of time on the degree that I'm taking in uni. and for many times after explaining, I always get a puzzled look. The kinda look you'll get if you talk nonsense to someone. Hence, for most of the time, I failed in expressing the real content of my course.

Mechatronics course is a new engineering course. It was created to cater a totally different field in engineering. Different as it is, it is not new. They used to call it ‘Instrumentation’ (prehistoric), and then they move to ‘control and systems’ (middle ages) and NOW they call it Mechatronics. If you break it down, Mechatronics means Mechanical, Electronics and Systems (although the word system was not included into the new name, but think about it, if they did they would have called it Mechasystronic or Mechatronicsys; Too complicated for the Ageing professor in Uni to remember it hahh).

I mention ‘Different as it is, it is not new’. This seems puzzling but I’m going to explain to you about that.

Basically, we study the Controls of a Systems. It might be the control system in a car, plant or anything. A simple working air conditioner is called a System and the process of maintaining the temperature of the airflow at a specific degree Celsius is called the Control.

NOPE we don’t create Screws or Nuts. Those are the jobs of the mechanical engineers. And NOPE we don’t create circuits or specify which capacitor to use for the circuits. That, I’m sorry to say, are the job of the electrical engineers. WE get the product of the mechanical engineers and electrical engineers and MERGE them together and…. Tadaa!! =) … created something useful. Like the ABS system in a car, the Controls in a Nuclear power plant, the flight control path in a missile and planes and many more.

And yes, WE DO COOL STUFF.

There’s a lot more things I could talk about but I think that’s enough for now.

I’ll end part 1 for now.

To be continued…

{brunei postgraduate symposium 2010}

Hi everyone! It's been a while since anyone last posted anything on the blog...

I'd like to share my experience attending the Brunei Postgraduate Symposium, held last Saturday at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London. In short, it was really good and worth going to!

This was the 2nd time the symposium has been held, with the inaugural event being last year. There were 3 keynote speakers, namely:

1) Hj Rozan DP Hj Md Yunos, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Development,

2) Dr Hj Omar Hj Khalid, Vice-Chancellor, ITB; and

3) Prof Tong Chee Kiong, Special Academic Advisor, ITB.

There were two panels, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, namely: the National Identity and Education Panel, as well as the Environmental, Health and Law Panel. In each panel there were about half a dozen speakers, Bruneians, coming not only from the UK but as far as Brunei and Australia. They each presented a paper detailing their research and postgraduate study. It was interesting, not only to see and hear about their work, but also how their work will relate to the development and benefit of Brunei in the future.

Also of particular interest were the three keynote speakers. They each gave a talk revolving around the theme of the symposium: "Sustainability & Growth: Securing our nation's future". I was especially intrigued by Prof Tong, who detailed the current new vision for UBD as a university not only focused on the educational needs of the Bruneian population, but also as a university known for its cutting-edge research, insyaAllah.

The day was quite an exhausting one as one had to concentrate for pretty much the whole time from morning listening to people speak, but it was definitely a rewarding one. I hope to be there again next year!

Ayyub

President

Good times..

Playing truth or dare when were on our way to BSB.

Nyaman ketawa si hadi..kurang ajher

hohoho