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 for students in the hardware track. 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 will be organized into groups of 2 persons (I will consider groups of 3, if necessary). There will be weekly project meetings to define projects, keep interfaces synchronized, share information, and coordinate activities. Within each project there may very well be separable peices that can proceed somewhat independently. However, they will be part of a common plan and interact tightly. Each team member is responsible for understanding all aspects of the project. We will spend the first two weeks of the quarter defiining the projects and forming teams as well as discussing the scope that each project is likely to have (most of these will be quite open-ended).
To guarantee that steady progress is made toward completing
the projects, you are asked to meet the following schedule of milestones.
The links in the description column provide some guidelines as what is required
for each milestone.
Date |
Milestone |
Description |
30 March |
Form groups, suggest projects |
Form teams and meet to discuss project ideas. Generate initial project ideas. Turn in group rationale and 3 project ideas. |
6 April |
Prepare project proposal |
Generate a complete project proposal that includes all the elements specified. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation. Begin organizing all your materials in this directory. All should be web browser accessible. |
20 April |
Update 1 |
First project update web pages include a description of the major issues and unknowns in your project and the experiments that will be run to resolve them. |
4 May |
Update 2, first draft of product brochure |
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. |
18 May |
First draft of final paper |
You will write your final report in the form of a paper to be submitted to a research workshop. Follow the format provided. For this first draft you will need to complete only the following sections: abstract, introduction, related work, approach, and societal implications (see the instructions). A first draft of your project poster is also due (use this template). Figures from your presentations should be useful for the poster. |
5 June |
Final paper, documentation, poster, and demo |
Final paper and technical
documentation completed. Poster finished and printed in time for the
poster session at 11:30-1:30 in Atrium. Demos in 003E in the afternoon
(SIGNUP). Each team member
should be prepared to answer any questions on any part of the implementation.
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Always update the project status page by appending a sentence or two to the top of the page (latest near the top) whenever you complete some work. Due this religiously so that we can easily monitor your progress. |
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In addition to written documentation, each student will also be responsible for an in-class design presentation. The first person to present in each group will present the project concept and general approach. The second person will present what was accomplished, what the demo is likely to be like, and what there is left to do. Use lots of figures and pictures to convey the key ideas. |