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 accomplishes 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 groups/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).

For this edition, there will be three major project teams. Each will have a team manager (the instructor and two industry consultants). There will be weekly project team meetings to define projects, keep their interfaces in synchronization, share information, and coordinate activities. Each team (of approximately 10 students) will be divided into approximately 4 groups of two or three people each.

The three project domains (to be elaborated further the first few weeks) are in home automation, data-centric heterogeneous networking, and in network services. There is a huge variety of possibilities within these domains and it is highly probable that students will have little difficulty in finding projects to their taste.

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 should 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 and team managers involving project selection, scope, tradeoffs, and demonstrations.

Date Milestone Description

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

15 Jan Choose project Decide on project after discussing ideas with instructor and team managers, complete the project proposal, and place it on the web.

12 Feb Update 1 First project update web pages include a description of the major issues and the experiments that will be run to resolve them. (Follow the guidelines for project update 1.)

5 Mar Update 2 Second project update outlines how the issues raised in the first project update were resolved and what changes, if any, were necessary in the scope of the project. (Follow the guidelines for project update 2.)

19 Mar Project demo
Final report Project demonstrations, the final report, the product brochure (see the Qualcomm pdQ phone/PDA and the 3Com PalmIII for examples), and web technical documentation must be completed. (Follow the guidelines for the final project report.)

Always update the project status page by appending a daily paragraph to the top of the page (latest near the top). Due this religiously so that the instructor and team managers can easily monitor your progress.

There will be a weekly project meeting with the team managers and all the members of the team (approximately 4 different projects). In addition, there will be two group meetings with the instructor during the first two weeks. 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. On-line sign-ups will be available for these meetings and each will last approximately 20 minutes.

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

Date	Milestone	Description
8 Jan	Form groups	Choose partner(s) and meet to discuss project ideas. Complete the project group description. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation.
15 Jan	Choose project	Decide on project after discussing ideas with instructor and team managers, complete the project proposal, and place it on the web.
12 Feb	Update 1	First project update web pages include a description of the major issues and the experiments that will be run to resolve them. (Follow the guidelines for project update 1.)
5 Mar	Update 2	Second project update outlines how the issues raised in the first project update were resolved and what changes, if any, were necessary in the scope of the project. (Follow the guidelines for project update 2.)
19 Mar	Project demo Final report	Project demonstrations, the final report, the product brochure (see the Qualcomm pdQ phone/PDA and the 3Com PalmIII for examples), and web technical documentation must be completed. (Follow the guidelines for the final project report.)
Always update the project status page by appending a daily paragraph to the top of the page (latest near the top). Due this religiously so that the instructor and team managers can easily monitor your progress.