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ECE445

ECE445 (Senior Design Project Lab) is a 4-credit-hour course that is specifically required for EEs as part of the electrical engineering technical core and satisfies the design elective requirement for CEs. It also fulfills the advanced composition requirement. It is offered in the spring and fall semesters.

Content Covered

  • Senior design project

ECE445 revolves around designing, building, and testing a project that reflects everything students have learned throughout the course of their college careers. Along the way, students learn about brainstorming ideas and the design process, and gain valuable experience in soldering, PCB layout, and microcontroller programming.

Prerequisites

The only official prerequisite is senior standing at the university. Having prior lab experience from other ECE courses, internships, or student organizations, including experience with soldering, PCB layout, and microcontroller programming is beneficial.

When to Take It

ECE445 is typically taken in the senior year.

Course Structure

ECE445 holds one lecture a week, only for the first three weeks of the class. These lectures generally explain the requirements of the course, provide time for outside parties to pitch projects to students, and allow for students to form groups and come up with project ideas. After these lectures, students are assigned a TA, with whom they will meet weekly for the remainder of the semester. The first phase of the class mainly relates to project design. Everything is to be well documented in a lab notebook. After finding partners, groups must submit a request for approval within the first three weeks of the course, outlining to TAs a general idea of their project. After the project is approved, a more complete proposal is required. This proposal should contain the objectives of the project, a high level block diagram of the hardware, a list of high level requirements and subsystem level requirements, and a discussion of ethics and safety. A few weeks after the second proposal, the design document is due. The design document is a complete blueprint for the project. It must contain a fully fleshed out electrical design, including schematics, simulations, more detailed high level and subsystem level requirements and verification, cost analysis, work schedule, and assessment of ethical issues. Students must present their design document to their professor and TA as part of the design review. The design review contains a substantial amount of writing and documentation, but fully prepares students to begin building their project. Additionally, in this phase of the course, students must complete a soldering assignment and a KiCad assignment to familiarize them with soldering and PCB layout.

The remainder of the course involves building and testing the project. A few weeks before the project is to be demonstrated, each student must submit an individual progress report that details his or her specific contributions to the project. Simulations, schematics and diagrams, and quantitative results should be presented. A final demo, which constitutes a large portion of the course points, is held near the end of the semester to showcase the project and allow course staff to evaluate the functionality of the project. A final presentation must also given to the course staff to formally discuss the project. A final written report is due at the end of the semester, and is similar to the design review, but updated to reflect the state of the finished project.

Instructors

Recently, Professors Fliflet, Gruev, Schuh, Chen, Fang, Mironenko, and Shao have served as instructors for this course.

Course Tips

  • Start early: This tip applies for all aspects of ECE445. Coming into the course with an idea will allow students to start on their project designs earlier. PCBs and project parts can take a while to arrive after being ordered, and teams will often need to order PCBs multiple times to get their project to work, so waiting until the last minute to work on the project will not result your team finishing the project.

Life After

Students who take this course are well prepared to graduate and move on to professional careers as electrical engineers. Students who wish to continue working on their projects are encouraged to take independent study, namely ECE397, ECE497, or ECE499.

Infamous Topics

None!

Resources

See the resources page on the ECE445 website.