CSE477 Project Information

A capstone design course is a senior-level course designed to enable students to bring together much of what they have learned in their undergraduate major and apply it to the design, construction, and documentation of a sizable and useful engineering artifact. In the Computer Engineering curriculum, CSE477 fills this role. The way it accomplished this is through a course project that ties together material previously encountered in the program. The project experience has several elements, including:

students work in teams so that they experience the issues in partitioning responsibilities, defining interfaces, and then integrating separately designed elements,
the project must include both hardware and software components as these are essential elements of all modern microelectronic systems,
the project must include communication aspects either between components of the system being designed or between it and some other system,
students present their work in class for design review with their fellow students as well as to enrich everyone's experience by sharing project-specific design decisions, and
a final report on the project that will also include complete documentation on how to construct and operate the system designed (see a sample project web and some previous project webs).

The class is divided into one or two person groups. This quarter, projects must be chosen from the domain of wearable/pocketable computing (there is much variety within this domain and I am always willing to entertain other ideas). Please see the list of suggested projects that also serves the function of giving you an idea of the scale and scope that is required of the projects. You should keep the following criteria in mind when choosing a project:

it should involve the interfacing of multiple components,
it should include communication between components or to/from the environment,
the software must have to deal with reactive, real-time interactions,
the project should have some constraints on power, size, and/or cost,
it should make effective use of microcontrollers and their software environments.

Projects Milestones

To guarantee that steady progress is made toward completing the projects, you are asked to meet the following schedule of milestones. These will be supplemented by meetings with the instructor involving project selection, scope, and parts requirements.

Date Milestone Description

9 Jan Form teams Choose partner(s) and meet to discuss project ideas. Complete the project team description. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation.

16 Jan Choose project Decide on project after discussing ideas with instructors, complete the project proposal, and place it on the web.

6 Feb Final parts list Finalize the parts list for the project (with instructors' approval) and place orders for the parts you will need with the lab technician (you can always start earlier on this) and fill out the parts list on the web.

13 Feb Update 1 First project update due. Web pages should include description of major issues and the experiments that will be run to resolve them following the guidelines of project update 1.

6 Mar Update 2 Second project update due. Outline how issues were resolved and what changes, if any, were necessary in the scope of the project following the guidelines of project update 2.

20 Mar Project demo Project demonstrations and completed web documentation following the guidelines for the final project report.

Always update the project status page by appending a daily/weekly paragraph to the top of the page. Due this religiously so that the instructors can easily monitor your progress.

There will be a minimum of three project meeting with the instructors. The first, in the second week, will address project selection. The second, in the third week, will look into basic planning for the project and determination of the open questions and how they will be answered. The third, in the fifth week, will set out a schedule for the rest of the quarter. On-line sign-ups will be available for these meetings and each will last approximately 20-30 minutes.

Comments to: cse477-webmaster@cs.washington.edu (Last Update: )

Date	Milestone	Description
9 Jan	Form teams	Choose partner(s) and meet to discuss project ideas. Complete the project team description. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation.
16 Jan	Choose project	Decide on project after discussing ideas with instructors, complete the project proposal, and place it on the web.
6 Feb	Final parts list	Finalize the parts list for the project (with instructors' approval) and place orders for the parts you will need with the lab technician (you can always start earlier on this) and fill out the parts list on the web.
13 Feb	Update 1	First project update due. Web pages should include description of major issues and the experiments that will be run to resolve them following the guidelines of project update 1.
6 Mar	Update 2	Second project update due. Outline how issues were resolved and what changes, if any, were necessary in the scope of the project following the guidelines of project update 2.
20 Mar	Project demo	Project demonstrations and completed web documentation following the guidelines for the final project report.
Always update the project status page by appending a daily/weekly paragraph to the top of the page. Due this religiously so that the instructors can easily monitor your progress.