Abstract—A student came to the engineering program at York College of Pennsylvania to major in Mechanical Engineering. After his first cooperative (co-op) education assignment with Multi-dimensional Integration, he became interested in automated manufacturing.  More specifically, he wanted to learn more about Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) in a manufacturing environment.  He really wanted to combine parts of a traditional mechanical engineering degree and parts of an electrical engineering degree.  This paper briefly describes the curriculum of this students self-designed major in “Electro-Mechanical Engineering”, and then more specifically concentrates on the capstone design experience. The capstone project was a PLC-based box sorting conveyor, and the student was tasked with designing the system from scratch. This paper provides the details on project planning, design, and implementation. 
 

Keywords—programmable logic controllers, CLICK programming software, self-designed major, capstone project 

Cite: Michael Lorenzen, Kala Meah, and Scott Kiefer, "Capstone Design Experience for a Self-Designed Major Engineering Student," International Journal of Learning and Teaching, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 691-696, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.