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Experiences from a new course in mechatronics at Technical University of Denmark are conveyed in this paper. The course is supposed to teach students enrolled in the bachelor degree in electrical engineering some fundamental knowledge about mechanics and to teach students enrolled in the bachelor degree in mechanical engineering fundamentals about electronics. Furthermore the course uses project work as a method to keep the students actively participating and in part have them teach each other the subjects. The general course plan is presented and the reasoning behind the course structure is discussed in the paper, together with a brief look at the student's reactions in form of data from the course evaluation.

As research and development of renewable and clean energy based systems is advancing rapidly, the nonlinear source emulator (NSE) is becoming very essential for testing of maximum power point trackers or downstream converters. Renewable and clean energy sources play important roles in both terrestrial and nonterrestrial applications. However, most existing NSEs have only been concerned with simulating energy sources in terrestrial applications, which may not be fast enough for testing of nonterrestrial applications. In this paper, a high-bandwidth NSE is developed that is able to simulate the behaviors of a typical nonlinear source under different critical conditions that can happen during their operations. The proposed 200-W NSE, which consists of a fourth-order output filter buck converter and a novel nonlinear small-signal reference generator, can quickly react not only to an instantaneous change in the input source but also to a load step between nominal and open circuit. Moreover, all of these operation modes have a very fast settling time of only 10 $\mu$ s, which is hundreds of times faster than that of existing works. This attribute allows for higher speed and a more efficient maximum power point tracking algorithm. The proposed NSE, therefore, offers a superior dynamic performance among devices of the same kind.

The safety-critical Java (SCJ) specification provides a restricted set of the Java language intended for applications that require certification. In order to test the specification, implementations are emerging and the need to evaluate those implementations in a systematic way is becoming important. In this paper we evaluate our SCJ implementation which is based on the Java Optimized Processor JOP and we measure different performance and timeliness criteria relevant to hard real-time systems. Our implementation targets Level 0 and Level1 of the specification and to test it we use a series of micro benchmarks, an application-based benchmark, and a reduced set of a SCJ technology compatibility kit. We evaluate the accuracy of periods, linear-time memory allocation, aperiodicevent handling, dispatch latency for interrupts, context switch preemption latency, and synchronization.

In this paper we describe an experimental investigation into the significance of different facial parts in the task of age estimation. For this purpose we use an automatic age estimation algorithm capable of producing an estimate of the age of a subject based on his/her face image. We perform automatic age estimation experiments using different facial parts of varying resolution so that the significance of facial parts in this application can be assessed. According to the results obtained, the internal part of the face and in particular the area around the eyes proved to be the most significant for the task of automatic age estimation.