Engineering 7803 Electrical Engineering Design Project I
Engineering 7804 Computer Engineering Design Project I

Engineering design integrates mathematics, natural sciences, engineering sciences, and complementary studies in order to develop elements, systems, and processes to meet specific needs. It is a creative, iterative, and open-ended process, subject to constraints which may be governed by standards or legislation to varying degrees depending on the discipline. These constraints may also relate to economic, health, safety, environmental, societal, or other interdisciplinary factors.[CEAB Accreditation Criteria and Procedures 2008, www.engineerscanada.ca]

Engineering 7803/4 is the first part of a pair of courses, continued in 8853/4, during which students will complete their senior design project. These courses together provide a significant design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier in the program, and give students an involvement in team work and project management.

Projects

Project proposals are invited from faculty, students and industrial clients and may be submitted to Dennis Peters and Rob Collett using the proposal template document. Projects must involve a significant design experience suitibly scoped for a team of three to five students working at a level of one regular course (approximately 10 hours per week) over two academic semesters. Some work may also be completed over the intervening work term. Clients need not be technical experts but must be prepared to interact with student teams as needed to ensure that the project requirements are understood and to give feedback on design outcomes. Clients will be asked to participate in the project review presentations at the end of the Spring semester (late July) and the final project presentations at the end of the Winter semester (late March). Students may propose their own project, but must include with the proposal an additional one page description of the motivation and technical background sufficient for the course coordinators to assess the appropriateness of the scope and technical challenge.

The list of available projects is posted here. Project teams are managed through Desire2Learn.

Organization & Deliverables

Lectures

Handouts for the lectures are available through Desire2Learn.

Deliverables

Project Selection

Assignment of individual students to particular projects is the purview of the course instructors. The following process will be followed:

1. From the list of available projects, students are to select the project(s) and role(s) that interest them and inform the course instructors of their choice by e-mail before 2359hrs Wednesday May 19.
   • Students may propose their own projects. These must be submitted as described above and approved prior to May 19.
   • Groups of students may propose to work together on a particular project(s). We don't promise to honour all such requests and may modify the group by addition or removal of students.
2. The assignment of students to projects will be announced on May 21.
3. Following the announcement, proposals for revised teams will be considered only with good cause and will normally only be approved if the revision is acceptable to all parties involved.

The Midterm Progress Meeting shall involve a 20 minute discussion of project progress with course coordiators near the halfway point of the term.

The Preliminary Design and Implementation Report shall be a comprehensive report complied by each project team. As a guideline, it is recommended that the document include the following sections:

• Introduction and Project Description
  • Summary of project concept
  • Thorough review of technical background and research
  • Discussion of engineering design within the project
  • Presentation of team organization and division of work
• Technical Design
  • Discussion of overall project scope including all modules and interfaces
  • Technical summary/specification for each project module
  • Comments on implementation results to date
• Project Schedule
  • Discussion of project progress to date in relation to orginal baseline schedule
  • Comments on progress, challenges, successes
  • Baseline schedule moving forward
• Statement of Project Budget and Resources
  • Discussion of project resource requirements
  • Budget update reflecting expenses to date and any revisions to initial estimates
  • Overview of projected expenses and resource requirements moving forward
  • Identification of sources of funding to support the estimated costs. (A small amount of funds may be approved for each project from the Faculty.)

Related Links

Competitions/Awards

• IEEE Canada Telus Innovation Award
• IEEE Canada Student Paper Competition

Intellectual Property

• MUN Policy

Revision Control

• Subversion home page
• Tortoise SVN -- An SVN client for Windows that integrates smoothly into Windows explorer.
• Subersive -- An Eclipse plug-in client for Subversion (this is the one I use).
• Subclipse -- Another subversion plugin for Eclipse.
• Version Control with Subversion -- an on-line book about subversion and how to use it.
• Subversion scripts for Mac OS X -- These give some limited integration of svn with Finder on Mac OS X. I forget where I found them, but credit is given in the readme. Read the readme to learn how to install them.

Last modified $Date: 2010-06-09 16:54:58 -0230 (Wed, 09 Jun 2010) $ ($Revision: 816 $) by $Author: dpeters $