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 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,
in-class design reviews 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 four major project teams. There will be weekly project meetings to define projects, keep their interfaces in synchronization, share information, and coordinate activities. I expect each team to consist of at 2-3 projects.

The four project themes around which the teams will be organized are in home automation, body networks, location-aware systems, and advanced user interfaces. There is a huge variety of possibilities within these domains and it is highly probable that students will find at least one project 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
01 Oct	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 Oct	Choose project	Decide on project after discussing ideas with instructor and team managers, complete the project proposal, and place it on the web.
05 Nov	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.)
24 Nov	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.)
16 Dec	Project demo	Project demonstrations in 327. These demonstrations should show the entire project in action. You should be ready to answer any questions on any part of the implementation.
16 Dec	Final report	Final report, product brochure (see Qualcomm pdQ phone/PDA, 3Com PalmIII, and last quarter's projects 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 instructor 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 fourth 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.

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