This course is for students with major status who are seniors within one year of graduation. In this course each student defines an engineering project that is selected with approval of the instructor. This project is planned and executed to completion over the course of two semesters.
There are three major learning objectives:
- Define and complete a significant engineering project
- Develop proposal and presentation skills
- Project organization, planning, and teamwork skills
The project will prepare the students for industry or graduate work.
- Class Logistics
- Class Schedule
- List of the Current Projects
- Assignment Details
- Previous Projects
- Other Helpful Information
- Acknowledgement
We will offer the class in-person at WEB L104 . We strongly request every one to follow the University's COVID-19 policy.
- Class (CS/ECE 3992)
- Location: In-person at WEB L104
- Time: 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM, Wednesday / Friday (excluding holidays)
- Zoom: https://utah.zoom.us/j/2468214418
- Prerequisites: ECE/CS 3710 and ECE/CS 3991
- Instructor: Prof. Tsung-Wei Huang
- Email: tsung-wei.huang@utah.edu
- Office hour: by appointment
- Teaching Assistant (TA): Yasin Zamani
- Email: yasin.zamani@utah.edu
- Office hour: by appointment
- Scoring (total 100%) - You get 0.5 penalty for each day of delay
- Engineering Evaluation (10%)
- Resume and Elevator Pitch (10%)
- Proposal PDF file (30%)
- Project Website (15%)
- Technical Open House (10%)
- Proposal Presentation (15%)
- Class Participation (10%)
- Recommended Textbook
- William Strunk and E. B. White, Elements of Style
- Prerequisites:
- ECE/CS 3710
- ECE/CS 3991
The schedule is subject to change.
- MercuryMesh: P2P Network for Autonomous Vehicles
- Smart Chessboard
- Smart Bike Kit
- HealthyBois (Heart Strawng 💖🥤) - Health Monitering App w/ Water intake and Heart rate tracking
- Zoom Peripheral
- Holofan
- VectorU: Active thrust vectoring at model rocket scale
- UGuard
- Textable Walkie-Talkies - TxTy
- Thesis: An assessment of the impact of unregulated transmissions on Intelligent Transportation System communications at 5.9GHz
- Thesis: Smart Helmet
- All assignments will be turned in via canvas.
- You will create a webpage or other repository where your project will be documented in real time
- You will be required to attend on session of the ECE technical open house
2-page PDF turned in via Canvas
This assignment helps you understand the goal of this course and lets you get started to think about what a good engineering project means. There are two parts of this assignment:
Engineers improve the life of those in the world around them by improving interfaces, adding capabilities, and fixing things that are broken. For this assignment you will keenly observe the every day world around you and determine what you, as a computer engineer, could do to improve it. Carry a note pad or cell phone and make notes of all the things that you observe over the next week. Turn in a report of identifying the improvement and sketch out your initial thoughts on how you would engineer a solution. The solutions should be realistic and feasible. Practice problem solving at a high level of abstraction and general project planning.
You will be graded on the problems set you identify, the problems having engineering solutions that you can identify, and your ability to define a reasonable project solution approach and effort estimate.
In this part, you need to watch the project videos from Fall 2020 and write down your comments for at least three projects.
- Auto Cat Toilet
- Autonomous Sailing Across the Great Salt Lake
- From Flab to Ab: A Smart Home Gym
- Lego Battle Bots
- Light Detection and Ranging Sensor Mapping
- Skynet: A Localized Mesh Communication Network
- Smart Sprinkler System with Real Time Feedback
- Virtual Reality Teleoperation Robot
1-page PDF of your resume (with link to your personal page) turned in via Canvas + in-class pitch
Sign up your pitch here!
Create a short resume and quick elevator speech (no slides) that describe why other students in the senior project section would want to "hire" you into their team. Include the engineering skills that you enjoy and that you feel you excel at. You may also want to include areas where you have interest in growth and learning. List any time or accessibility constraints you might have. These would include that you already have a team and your project is half done, you have a work schedule that limits availability, etc. Also, provide a quick overview of interesting design ideas that you are keen to pursue.
Have fun. This must fit on one page, and the presentation may not be more than three minutes. Extra points for serious creativity.
You can have a look at the following resume examples:
We have provided a template for you to quickly get your website up and running. In addition, you will find the following links useful for building a website:
- GitHub Pages: We suggest using GitHub pages to place your html soruces
- W3School: Tutorial pages for learning html
- Bootstrap: Tutorial pages for learning bootstrap
1-page PDF with link to your project website turned in via Canvas
We ask you to use GitHub page to highlight your team, project ideas, and implementation progress. This page must be visible online to all members of your project plus the instructor and the TA. We understand during the project execution, things change quickly and you may switch to another team (though not recommended). So, this assignment has three dues, and each due must be different from the other and the next due should contain more progress than the previous one.
At a minimum, your project page should contain the following:
- Project title
- keep it simple and precise (7-10 words optimally)
- Team members
- each team has 3-4 students
- Project abstract
- What is your project?
- Why is it important? (make me happy? free? successful?)
- Keep your abstract around 100 words
- Challenges
- What are the software-level challenges? (at least 3)
- What are the hardware-level challenges? (at least 3)
- Proposed methods
- how are you going to deal with the challenges you identify?
- how are you going to mitigate the risk involved in your methods?
- Monetary items
- identify a list of monetary items
- summarize a rough budget of your project
- Timetable of project-related activities starting from 2/26
- What is the job distribution?
- What is the prototype you plan to finish by end of the semester?
- Add a table to summarize your progress weekly
- Collaboration plan
- How are you going to communicate with team members? (e.g., zoom, in-person)
- How are you going to resolve conflicting voices?
- How are you going to maintain good team momentum?
- How are you going to do when team members fail to achieve assigned progress?
- How are you going to distribute budget?
Sign up your presentation slot here!
Please see lecture18 for details about your presentation.
5-10 pages of your final proposal turned in via Canvas
This document will consist of a 5 to 10 page draft of your final proposal. This draft will clearly identify the key idea of your project, why it is interesting, and add substantial detail on how it will be implemented. The draft will contain relatively complete and polished versions of the following sections: abstract, introduction, background and bibliography for sources used in these sections. A draft of the proposed work, schedule, and required resources need to be included. Be sure to include a risk assessment as part of the proposed work.
You need to participate in the ECE Technical Open House, which is scheduled to be at 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM on 4/27 via zoom, and submit your comment on 2-3 projects via Canvas.
Please register for the open house here. The flyer can be found here.
You need to complete the course evaluation on by logging into scf.utah.edu/blue, which counts for 3 points in your participation score. Once you have completed the evaluation, please email the instructor (tsung-wei.huang@utah.edu) the screenshot of the confirmation page. DO NOT attach any written comments that must remain confidential.
This is a list of previous projects which can be a good reference for the design and implementation of your projects.
- Radio Shack: Making an effort to be an electronics hobbyist store again
- Ra-El Co: Amazing electronics junk store; 2870 S. Main Street, SLC
- NPS Industrial: Random remaindered supplies - tools, wire, equipment, etc; 1601 Empire Rd, South Salt Lake
- Harbor Freight Tools: The best place to buy tools that you'll use only once; 3470 S. State, SLC
This page is modified from Prof. Ken Steven's CS 3992 page.