Instructors

  • Major Mathieu Drolet
  • Captain Tim Chisholm

 

Aim of the course

All ECE 4th year BEng students shall complete an engineering design project, where they take a solution to an engineering problem from its requirements through to its design and implementation. The project is to demonstrate the student’s ability to:

  • assess a problem and define it in engineering terms;
  • apply an applicable engineering process;
  • apply engineering knowledge to conceive possible solutions;
  • evaluate constraints and options to choose an optimum solution for implementation;
  • produce a preliminary and detailed engineering design within the limits of the problem’s constraints;
  • implement, integrate, prototype, and/or simulate the design;
  • measure the performance of the product against the project requirements; and
  • communicate findings at the various stages of the project in written and oral formats.

 

Evaluation

Students are evaluated on the submission of several deliverables throughout the year

DID-01: Project Commitment Document (PCD) Is a contract between students and a supervisor, detailing the committed project and the engineering problem to be solved.

DID-03: Statement of Requirements (SOR) is a document which translates the project idea into a set of well-defined technical requirements. Also serves to communicate the benefits of the project, as well as identify the known constraints.

DID-04: Preliminary Design Specifications (PDS) is a document that serves to outline an initial design plan, including design methodologies, equipment determination, scheduling, and risks.

DID-05: Design Review (DR) is a presentation provided to the department members reviewing the initial plan of each project. These presentations provide valuable feedback in order to proceed with the project’s detailed design and implementation.

DID-07: Detailed Design Document (DDD) is the main project document detailing the final design. This document provides full project design details, how project scope and schedule evolved, testing results, and any other project feedback.

DID-08: Final Project Presentation (FPP) is a presentation provided to the department members demonstrating the project design, results of project testing, and answer questions from the faculty.

DID-09: Final Project Demonstration (FPD) provides a demonstration of the completed engineering project to the department.

 

Scope

The EEE455/457 design project shall incorporate a number of key engineering activities and concepts. Together, these form the criteria by which the academic validity of a candidate project is determined, and by which project deliverables are evaluated. These criteria are:

  1. Analysis and Design - specification of required function, performance, and interfacing and the translation of the requirement into representations of architecture, algorithmic procedure and interface characteristics;
  2. Engineering Process - methods and procedures, which encompass the broad array of tasks involved in project execution and the sequence and products of those tasks;
  3. Implementation - the production and completion of a work product to meet the requirement in accordance with the design, including the necessary verification and validation testing;
  4. Technical Difficulty - the engineering design project shall provide the student with the opportunity to work on a significant problem of greater scope than typical laboratory exercises; and
  5. Communication - effective communication of ideas and results, both orally and in written form. Students will be required to submit, as work products, a number of Data Item Descriptions (DIDs). These data items can be written documents, oral presentations, computer program source/binaries, design schematics, etc. as specified by the appropriate DID.

 

Project Organization

The organizational framework of EEE455/457 is made up of a Project Management Office (PMO), a number of project cells (student teams) and their respective faculty supervisors. Each project cell is composed of two or three students, and a staff supervisor.