Senior Project

[CMAN]

Bah, I have to choose a senior project for college by Friday, and I can't think of anything exciting to choose. I thought of an automatic bartender but my partner didn't like the idea (thought we wouldn't be taken seriously ).

Anyone have any good project ideas for an electrical engineering student?

 

[RussSchultz]

Electrical engineering is a broad field....could you narrow it down?

 

[CMAN]

Sure. I'm open for most anything interesting, which is why I kept the question very broad. I am going for a concentration in Controls though.

 

[Captain Chickenpants]

What kinds of things normally get done?
Can you get some kind of industrial link to it?
How much time do you have, how much resource do you have?

As an idea, here are the projects I worked on at uni (not completly relevant as I was a software engineer, but gives you an idea of the types of things that get done).

Our final year project was a group project which was sponsered by a company .I will refrain from mentioning them, but as project sponsors they were rubbish, the projects and sponsors were arranged by the university and we drew the short straw on our sponsors, in the end we had to do a different (but related) project. It was a fuzzy logic control system, that could be linked to a PC or worked on it's own, that would balance a ball bearing on a beam.

Third year project was a solo project PLD Shell to PIC translator, PLD shell is a hardware description language used for chip design. My task was to try and simulate the circuit on a pic microcontroller.

As a 2nd year was a group project we did an image processing demo system on a single board computer (which meant that we had to write all the primative stuff to actually draw text or menus etc), as well as to drive the

1st year project was to implement text to speech rules for Spanish. Ie given a Spanish sentence construct the phonemes to send to a speech synthesizer.

Hope that gives you some ideas!

 

[_xxx_]

CMAN, how complicated/big should it be?

 

[CMAN]

CMAN, how complicated/big should it be?

The first semester will be devoted to research on the project (up into December). And the second semester will be devoted to building/doing the project. The project should be "big", but accomplishable by a small team (2-4 people).

The idea for the project, is to show employers that you have accomplished a larger scale project similar to one you may find in the work place.

One example is one professor is working on a UAV. He has multiple groups though working to upgrades/improve parts of the UAV. Does that help?

 

[CMAN]

What kinds of things normally get done?
Can you get some kind of industrial link to it?
How much time do you have, how much resource do you have?

As an idea, here are the projects I worked on at uni (not completly relevant as I was a software engineer, but gives you an idea of the types of things that get done).

Our final year project was a group project which was sponsered by a company .I will refrain from mentioning them, but as project sponsors they were rubbish, the projects and sponsors were arranged by the university and we drew the short straw on our sponsors, in the end we had to do a different (but related) project. It was a fuzzy logic control system, that could be linked to a PC or worked on it's own, that would balance a ball bearing on a beam.

Third year project was a solo project PLD Shell to PIC translator, PLD shell is a hardware description language used for chip design. My task was to try and simulate the circuit on a pic microcontroller.

As a 2nd year was a group project we did an image processing demo system on a single board computer (which meant that we had to write all the primative stuff to actually draw text or menus etc), as well as to drive the

1st year project was to implement text to speech rules for Spanish. Ie given a Spanish sentence construct the phonemes to send to a speech synthesizer.

Hope that gives you some ideas!

Thanks! Your final year project seems about the complexity mine should be. Did you get it to work?

 

[Captain Chickenpants]

Thanks! Your final year project seems about the complexity mine should be. Did you get it to work?

Yep.
We even won first prize of a slap up meal at a (very expensive) Thai Restaurant.

You could try rain detecting clothes pegs, unfortunatly someone has already done them
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4218586.stm

 

[_xxx_]

So standard stuff.

Just from the top of my head: a µC-based LED clock (we did this back then), a device for measuring fluid level in a closed container based on capacitance measurment, a simple engine controller, a system for optical recognition/analysis of certain small parts like screws or such on the production line, a HF resonator for destroying cancer cells (these resonate on different freqs then normal cells, that would of course be a pure research project), a simple gearbox controller,...

 

[pocketmoon66]

Anyone have any good project ideas for an electrical engineering student?

I built a guitar effects processor. I think I called it a digital audio reverberation simulator or somesuch.

Ran on blueboard with 8bit ADC/DAC and an ARM risc cpu in the middle which ran at a mighty 6Mhz. The whole thing was designed and built from scratch, probably the most complex thing I've ever done in my life.

Hey - You could build a game console

 

[Captain Chickenpants]

Something I thought that could be interesting is if you replaced the normal radio control on a radio control car with some form of digital data link.
You could stick a simple microcontroller onboard, and have it respond to commands from a master. As well as simply behaving like a normal RC, you could have it report information, store pre controlled programs, use external sensors to avoid obstacles etc.

The nice thing is that you can adjust the complexity to suit your project quite easily. If you make it modular then it could be used by other projects as a platform to build on.

Paul.

 

[CMAN]

I was thinking of creating a picture search egine. You would select to search for pictures by either selecting a color (such as green for grass or trees), or by cropping a face from a picture (say my face). The search engine would then search for pictures with such features. I'm not sure if it is feasible, but it sounds cool. The only problem is it is more programming than I'd like, but we might use a DSP or something.

I wouldn't want to put Sony and Microsoft out of business, so I might not do the game console.

 

[CMAN]

Something I thought that could be interesting is if you replaced the normal radio control on a radio control car with some form of digital data link.
You could stick a simple microcontroller onboard, and have it respond to commands from a master. As well as simply behaving like a normal RC, you could have it report information, store pre controlled programs, use external sensors to avoid obstacles etc.

The nice thing is that you can adjust the complexity to suit your project quite easily. If you make it modular then it could be used by other projects as a platform to build on.

Paul.

I was thinking something similar at one point, where it would refuse to run into walls and stuff. That way a kid couldn't destory his RC within one hour. Your idea sounds cool too.