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 for students in the hardware track. 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 so that they experience the issues in partitioning responsibilities, defining interfaces, and then integrating separately designed elements,
the project must include several communicating components,
the project must include a strong user interaction aspect,
in-class design reviews enrich everyone's experience by sharing project-specific design decisions, and
a final report, in the form of a conference submission on the project that will also include complete documentation on how to construct and operate the system designed as an appendix (see a sample project web and some previous project webs).

Students will be organized into groups of 2 persons (I will consider groups of 3, if necessary). There will be weekly project meetings to define projects, keep interfaces synchronized, share information, and coordinate activities. Within each project there may very well be separable peices that can proceed somewhat independently. However, they will be part of a common plan and interact tightly. Each team member is responsible for understanding all aspects of the project. We will spend the first two weeks of the quarter defiining the projects and forming teams as well as discussing the scope that each project is likely to have (most of these will be quite open-ended).

Projects Milestones

To guarantee that steady progress is made toward completing the projects, you are asked to meet the following schedule of milestones. The links in the description column provide some guidelines as what is required for each milestone.

Date	Milestone	Description
8 April	Form groups, suggest projects	Form teams and meet to discuss project ideas. Generate initial project ideas. Turn in group rationale and 3 project ideas.
15 April	Prepare project proposal	Generate a complete project proposal that includes all the elements specified. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation. Begin organizing all your materials in this directory. All should be web browser accessible.
27 April	Update 1	First project update web pages include a description of the major issues and unknowns in your project and the experiments that will be run to resolve them.
18 May	Update 2, first draft of product brochure	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. A first draft of a project brochure should accompany update 2.
1 June	First draft of final paper	You will write your final report in the form of a paper to be submitted to the Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA) 2004. Follow the format provided. Here is an example paper.
10 June	Final paper, documentation, product brochure, and demo	Final paper and technical documentation completed. Product brochure finished. Demo in 003E. Each team member should be prepared to answer any questions on any part of the implementation. The group web pages should be complete and include all elements of documentation (from initial proposal, through presentations and updates, to final paper and brochure). Use only .doc, .pdf, .jpeg, .gif, or .html files.
Always update the project status page by appending a sentence or two to the top of the page (latest near the top) whenever you complete some work. Due this religiously so that we can easily monitor your progress.
In addition to written documentation, each student will also be responsible for an in-class design presentation. The first person to present in each group will present the project concept and general approach. The second person will present what was accomplished, what the demo is likely to be like, and what there is left to do. Use lots of figures and pictures to convey the key ideas.

Comments to: cse477-webmaster@cs.washington.edu (Last Update: 04/11/04 )