EE 476: Laboratory 6

Design project.

Introduction.

For this exercise, we want you to pick a project, then design and build it. During this period there will be no other assignments, so we expect you to spend all of your time for this course on the project. As a rough estimate, this means a minimum of 12 hours/week in lab. You will be expected to be in lab at the usual times and to show significant progress each week of the project.

Grading:

When choosing a project you will need to consider availability of hardware, time available, a monetary budget, and your programming skill. You may want to look at several of the links on the 476 home page for project ideas.


Procedure:

Depends on what you will build. You should talk often to your lab instructor. You can use either ASM or C or a mixture of the two. Your project will be limited to using one STK-500 development board at all times. If you need more than one cpu, you will have to build a prototype board, which will count against your budget.

Special project restrictions:

Budget considerations:

Your budget will include MCU(s), boards you build, power supplies, parts you order, and everything else you buy. Budget exceptions:

I will order parts from the following vendors once/week:

Budget Details:

Student observations:

A group in 2002 added the following thoughts.

Here are the top 10 things you can do to survive EE 476 Final Project Month:

1. If you use a chip other than the one you've been using in class all semester, read the documentation thoroughly, subtle differences are going to kill you. It's just a matter of for how long they kill you.
2. If you feel heat from your board, or smell burning: THERE IS A SHORT. Don't look for the short first. TURN OFF THE POWER!
3. If the voltages look right, and the wiring looks right, but nothing's happening, it is possible that your chip is fried, don't be afraid to ask for another chip. This would've saved me a week of pain, and a bad hit to morale.
4. If you're stuck on something, ask Bruce or the TA's. Make a reasonable attempt to solve it yourself, but don't sit there for three hours just because you cannot remember which port of the opamp is correct. Remember, we all look like we're working, so Bruce's spider sense won't kick in. You must call him, he can't call you.
5. Order parts early. Order duplicates if you can afford it.
6. If you're going to solder onto a perf board, you don't have to rip apart your breadboard. Just make another copy of the circuit.
7. You will not finish if you don't start early.
8. You probably won't finish if you don't take advantage of extended lab hours.
9. Do what you can do out of lab out of lab.
10. Seriously, pick a project you'll enjoy. These four weeks can be pain, or the most fulfilling of your Cornell Career.

A group in 2003 added this:

Know your limits. As much as we'd all love to have a final project whose bells and whistles rival Las Vegas slot machines, realize that a month is a very short time, and that dealing with the disappointment of having to scale back your project as you progress along is much better than coming to the same realization on the day of your demonstration.


Assignment

You will be graded on several aspects of the project:

  1. Appropriate level of hardware/software complexity.
  2. Appropriate use of assembler and C.
  3. A project which works according to specification (which you will write).
  4. Level of effort and organization shown in lab.
  5. Ability to say within budget.
  6. A demonstration of the final project during the last regular scheduled lab period of the semester. The demonstration will include an explanation of your web page describing the project.
  7. Completeness and understandability of the final report. The report must be handed in when you do the project demo during your last regular lab period. The report which you hand in must be printed directly from a web page which you construct. If you submit your web page to be included on the course web page (see below), you do not have to print source code. The web page will consist of one folder with exactly one html file with the file name index.html. In the folder there may be c-source files, images, mpegs, or other supporting documents linked to the one html file. Style examples: wireless EMG, intellibot.
    Documentation must include all the major sections. You may omit specific sections not relevant to your project:

The web page may optionally be submitted for inclusion on the class web page. If you will ever be asking me for a recommendation, I suggest that you submit your project. The project web pages help me remember the details of a project.
If you wish to do this:

  1. Put all of your web page files in one directory.
  2. Name this directory with the concantented netids of all the group members, e.g., brl4_bfg88
    Since the pages will be on a UNIX server, you must:
  3. ZIP the directory.
  4. email it to BRL4@cornell.edu.


Copyright Cornell University Dec 2006