Final Project
Contents
CS 3651 Final Project
In this class, half of your grade comes from a final project. The final project is an open ended project for teams of 1, 2 or 3. It’s up to you to form teams, come up with ideas, and research how feasible they are.
We will provide you a list of pre-approved projects, or you can develop and propose one of your own. We’ll then give you feedback on how feasible we think your projects are in the remaining time in the semester, and approve your idea once it meets our requirements.
(Thanks to Scott Gilliland and Thad Starner)
Project Scope
Your projects should include mechanical, electrical, and software components. It should also include some kind of digital logic, likely a microcontroller, with input, processing done on the microcontroller, and output. Ideally, it should do something that you find interesting or solves some problem.
You have access to the laser wood cutter and the 3d printer for your projects.
There is no requirement that your idea be novel, but you do need to be working out the issues of your project yourself duplicating a project from the internet part for part and wire for wire isn’t likely to be interesting enough project.
Project Proposal
You and your team will provide an up to 10 minute presentation on your idea. You should submit PDF of your presentation via T-square so we can project it for the class to see. The proposal should include:
- Written description of what you want to build
- One or more 3d renderings of your vision for the project. These can be a rough design (hand drawn is OK).
- Identification of team roles: Who will do what.
- Parts you're considering to use.
- Risks: Things you don't know that you're going to have to solve. Obviously you should prioritize solving those problems.
- Milestones: Specific dates on which you expect to accomplish/demonstrate progress on your project.
- Fallback plans: What if the most ambitious component of your project fails, what can you do instead?
- A grading scale of what you would expect to accomplish to earn an ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’ on the project.
We expect the presentation to be 3 to 5 pages including diagrams.
We’ll work with you to adjust these so that each team has realistic but still difficult enough goals. For example, if you were trying to make a ball pitching machine, an ‘A’ might be a fully functional machine, a ‘B’ might be a machine that can only put a small amount of spin on the ball in one direction or pitches too slowly to be useful, and ‘C’ might be a machine that can pitch balls, but can’t control the spin speed.
Early turnins and discussions with the instructor and TAs are encouraged.
Next Steps
Once your project idea is approved, you should get started. Most of you will discover that you will need to order at least some parts from electronics parts suppliers, motors or sensors from hobby shops, or perhaps even custom designed circuit boards from a PCB manufacturer. Order your parts early to leave time to reorder parts if your first plan doesn’t work out. Toward the end of the semester, we’ll have several weeks with few or no skill demos to leave time for you to work on the project.
Milestone 1: Electronic Feasibility
The goal for this milestone is that you demonstrate the electronic components of your system working together and "twitching." In other words that your sensors are connected to your computer and your computer makes the motors move. You should focus on demonstrating the success (or failure) of the riskiest component of your design.
Milestone 2: Mechanical Feasibility
The goal for this milestone is that you demonstrate the mechanical components of your project. You should have final 3d designs for your project complete by this date, and at least some of the parts created.
Demonstration to Class
By the end of the semester, you should have your project working. You should aim to have your project finished by the last day of class, when each group will have a 5minute time to tell or show the class about what they’ve been working on. This will be the due date for the project, but we will still consider late work done before the finals period.
Next, we’ll have each group sign up for a 15 minute time slot during finals week to give us a final demonstration and to answer our questions about how the project worked out. We’ll also expect a zip file with a short writeup of the project and any source code and design files for the project.
Ideas from previous semesters
- A two-legged walking robot with off-robot controller (group project)
- Autonomous glider, uses GPS
- Heat seeking missile
- Multilink robot arm with gripper
- Robot that can solve rubik's cube
- Skittles sorter
- An autonomous submarine
- An autonomous sailboat
- An autonomous motorboat
Grading
The project makes up 50% of your course grade, split as follows:
- 40% from the project work itself.
- 5% from the proposal and demonstration
- 5% from the postproject write-up
