In the ECE Department, the Capstone Project is a three quarter sequence. To enter the capstone sequence, students must have achieved senior standing. Students take a lecture course in the fall quarter which introduces them to engineering design project methodology. During the winter and spring quarters, students complete and document their projects. Student teams are responsible for finalizing, summarizing, and confirming the project requirements, creating a project plan and presenting it for approval, completing the design project and related documentation, testing, writing a final project report, and making a final project presentation to the community partner.
We expect our students to:
Practice a systematic and thorough design methodology – no “hacking”
As emphasized in the ECE 211/212 and ECE 411 classes.
Make a serious effort to complete the project
Each student is expected to spend 8-10 hours per week on the project and give you an individual written weekly progress report (WPR).
Generate detailed and thorough documentation of all work
Documentation will play an important part in the grading for the ECE 412 and ECE 413 classes. Each group is required to produce a Project Proposal (Product Design Specification plus Project Plan), a Final Report, and a Project Poster. Each individual student is also required to keep a log of their work, including specifications, research, thoughts, design work, experiments, conclusions, meeting agendas, meeting minutes, reference information, etc.
Work at developing more effective oral/written communication
Each team will be required to submit a written weekly progress report (WPR) to both the community partner and the faculty advisor. This WPR will contain updates from each individual team member. Also, each team is required to make intermediate progress reports and have design reviews as appropriate. Ideally students should have the chance to individually make at least one oral weekly progress report.
Individual grades are based upon:
Successful completion of the project
Adherence to a disciplined design methodology
Project Proposal (Product Development Specification and Project Plan)
Effective communication throughout the project
weekly written progress reports
team meetings
engineering logbooks
project notebooks
Final Report
Oral presentations to the sponsor (optional) and at the ECE Capstone Poster Session (required)
Individual contribution to the project’s success
While your final grade is assigned by the faculty advisor, the community partner's recommendations are given particular weight so we ask them to complete a brief evaluation for each student also.
Each member of your team needs to complete a completed team evaluation and self assessment twice during your project: once by the end of Winter quarter, and another at the end of the spring quarter. Usually these are CATME surveys.
Your team must maintain a project collaboration site that include shared documentation (e.g., a wiki, Google docs, Sharepoint, etc) and usually a repository (Git, etc) for technical deliverables. This is required even if the sponsor does not require it.
Weekly progress reports play a crucial role in team communication and keeping a project on track and on schedule. Each week on a day agreed to by your sponsor and/or faculty advisor you need to send an email containing your teams (and thus your own) weekly progress report (WPR). The e-mail should be sent to each of your teammates as well as your industry sponsor and faculty advisor. It's a good idea to cc: yourself so that you have a record and can include them in your project notebook. It's a good idea to make the subject line of your WPR e-mail include your project name and the keyword "WPR" along with the period covered (e.g. the week ending date).
Your team's weekly report should be brief but contain:
A brief refresher on the overall project, your part in the project, and your specific tasks and goals from the prior week
An explanation of what actions you took and what you accomplished
A description of what problems you encountered and how you solved them
A discussion of problems remaining and your thoughts on possible solutions
Anything that is blocking you from making progress
Your action plan for the following week
Engineering logbooks may or may not be required for your project. Consult your sponsor and faculty advisor during your first team meeting to determine if it will be required for your project. A principal use of the Engineering Logbook is to document IP development in support of patent applications. For that purpose you must adhere to specific standards for it to be useful:
Your engineering logbook must be a contemporaneous chronological record of your work
It should be written so that someone else ("skilled in the art") can follow your design work and verify it with minimum effort
Your log should be a detailed record of every part of your design process
The format should be neat, readable, durable, and orderly
However, even in organizations that do not require engineering logbooks to protect IP, most engineers still use them. You are required to maintain an engineering logbook for your capstone project. Your faculty advisor will review it periodically, and you'll be required to turn it in at the completion of the project. Check with your industry sponsor to see if they have specific requirements for their engineers. At a minimum, your engineering logbook should include:
Project Description
Research
Sources
URLs
A summary of the information obtained and an explanation/evaluation of how it relates to your project
Your thought process on each part of the project
All work
What you did
What results you obtained
Projected next steps
Equations
Calculations
Drawings
Block diagrams
Explanatory Text
Contemporaneous meeting notes (regular meetings, design reviews, etc)
References to documents maintained in the Project Notebook