ELEC 243 Lab

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Up to now working in the lab has been like building a kit: the lab experiments have been pre-designed, carefully tested, and described in minute detail. If you follow the instructions it should work. Since the purpose of these labs has been to illustrate underlying principles and provide an opportunity to practice new skills, this has been an appropriate approach.

But the ultimate reason for you to understand these principles and learn these skills is so that you can design and construct your own measurement, communication, and control systems. The purpose of this final lab is to allow you to combine this dearly acquired knowledge and skill with your innate engineering creativity to produce a lab project of your own design. In this lab there are no instructions, only a goal. That goal is for you to design, build, and test a system which meets a specified set of requirements.

Since this will be a substantial project, it will require a substantial amount of resources. To accommodate this requirement, we will make a few changes in the format and structure of the lab for the remaining weeks. In particular you will have available:

More time.

Since this project will be significantly more complex than a regular 243 lab, you probably won't finish in a single week. Since there are no additional regular labs scheduled, you have essentially the rest of the semester available. To encourage you to utilize this remaining time effectively, we have placed some structure on it, including a few fixed milestones. See the Timeline section for more details.

More people.

Even with the additional time it will be useful to have more hands to fabricate circuits and write Labview programs, as well as a greater diversity of minds to come up with ideas. So design teams will be formed by combining two lab groups. You are free to choose the group with which you will merge, but make that choice carefully. You want to work with people that you can get along with, but you also want to join with people whose skills complement your own. One restriction: the size of the resulting group must be between 3 and 5 (inclusive) so two groups of three may not combine.

More stuff.

With two lab groups working together, there are twice as many parts and twice as many breadboards available with which to fabricate your circuits. Even so, some of the projects may be difficult to build using only the components from your parts kits. We will provide additional quantities of standard parts, a number of specific new parts, and access to essentially arbitrary parts of your choosing. See the Resources section for more details.