ECE 2804:
Integrated Design Project
(selected team posters)
As part of the total redesign of the sophomore curriculum in ECE, a course to provide students with an exposure to open-ended design was created. This course is intended to help students integrate and cement the knowledge they gain in the other six required courses by tackling an open-ended design project that requires understanding of both the electrical and computer engineering concepts they have been taught.
All sophomores are required to take this course before moving on to their chosen major in the junior year. The students work in teams of two or three and get to choose from three different projects each semester. Each project has some overall objectives with many ways to achieve the objectives. The students work on the project for twelve weeks and this extended timeframe allows for the exploration of alternative solutions and the time for creative problem solving that is not possible in normal class projects.
This term, the students chose from the following three projects:
Smart Home Project: Integrate sensors, actuators, a microcontroller, and a smart phone app to provide features found in a smart home.
Wind Turbine Project: 3D print a scaled version of a wind turbine and process the power generated from a 3-phase generator to provide a regulated DC output with high efficiency.
Audio Direction Finding Project: Determine the direction of arrival of a 1 KHz audio source.
After choosing their project, the team generates milestones for each remaining three week interval. They write weekly reports documenting their progress, design details, test results, and any problems they have encountered. This document is the basis for their weekly meetings with their instructor. In addition, there are two oral presentations during the course of the project and a final report. It is hoped that this guided experience in scheduling, designing, simulating, building, testing and documenting a significant project will better prepare the students for the major design experience in their senior year.
This is the first semester the course has been taught and we offered student groups that did a particularly good job on their projects the opportunity to present their results at the major design experience expo for the seniors. Despite the extra challenges presented by the advent of the pandemic, four student teams ably overcame all of the challenges and were selected to present at the virtual expo: