CSE476 Project Information

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, CSE476 fills this role for students in the embedded software 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 work in groups so that they experience the issues in partitioning responsibilities, defining interfaces, and then integrating separately designed elements,
the project must include several communicating components,
the project must include a strong user interaction aspect,
in-class design reviews enrich everyone's experience by sharing project-specific design decisions, and
a final report on the project that will also include complete documentation on how to construct and operate the system designed (see a sample project web and some previous project webs).

Students will be organized into teams of 3 persons (I will consider groups of 2 or 4). 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 share a common infrastructure and interact tightly and each team member is still 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).

Projects Milestones

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
17 January	Form groups	Form teams and meet to discuss project ideas. Generate initial project ideas.
24 January	Refine project description	Refine initial project into a project description after discussions with team members and instructor. Complete the project group description. Each group will be provided with a web server directory in which to store all project documentation. Begin organizing all your materials in html.
29 January	Project proposal	Generate a complete project proposal that includes all the elements of the sample outline.
12 February	Update 1	First project update web pages include a description of the major issues and the experiments that will be run to resolve them.
26 February	Industrial Affiliates poster	Use the template and use last year's project posters as a guide.
5 March	Update 2	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.
20 March	Project demo	Project demonstrations in 327. These demonstrations should show the entire project in action. Each team member should be prepared to answer any questions on any part of the implementation. You should have your project brochure ready at this demonstration.
20 March	Final report	Final report and technical documentation must be completed. The group web pages should be complete and include all elements of documentation (from initial proposal, through presentations and updates, to final report and brochure). Use only .pdf, .jpeg, .gif, or .html files.
Always update the project status page by appending a daily paragraph to the top of the page (latest near the top). Due this religiously so that the instructor and team managers can easily monitor your progress.
In addition to written documentation, each student will also be responsible for an in-class design presentation. Each person will pick one aspect of their project and discuss it in detail so as to provide enough information to help others understand the issues and tradeoffs in the design. The first presentation from each group will present the project and its major elements. The last presentation from each group will present the demonstration that will take place on 20 March and the current status of the project. All the presentations will take place during the second half of the quarter during lecture hours and we will have a sign-up process for scheduling.

There will be a weekly project meetings for each team with their team managers. You should make sure to pick a time that will work easily with your schedule and will not cause you to miss any meetings. These are crucial events each week.

Comments to: 476-webmaster@cs.washington.edu (Last Update: 01/20/02 )