ELEC 243 Lab
Documentation
As always, you should keep a record of all of your work
in your lab notebook.
This should include not only the work you do while in the
lab, but also summaries of research, analysis, group meetings,
etc. that take place outside the lab.
Although your lab notebook should represent a complete record
of your design work, it will
probably not be an efficient description of the
results
of your work.
Since the most important result of the design process
is an accurate, understandable description of what was designed,
you will be asked to provide a
Design Report
containing just such a description.
Your report should succinctly but thoroughly discuss
the following areas.
Exclusive of the appendix, the result should be
3 to 5 pages long.
-
Definition and Requirements.
Give a concise description of what your system is supposed to do.
List the specific requirements you intend to meet.
-
The Design Process.
Describe how you got from the statement of requirements
to your final design.
Discuss the decisions that you made,
including alternatives which were considered
and reasons for their rejection.
-
The Final Design.
Describe in detail how your design works.
If appropriate, provide a block diagram of
your system and explain how each block works
and how they interact.
-
Test Results.
Describe the tests that you performed to verify that
your design meets the specified requirements.
-
Appendix.
Material which would impede the narrative flow of your
document, but is nevertheless essential to the description
of your design, should be gathered together and placed in
an appendix.
This includes such things as
circuit diagrams,
printouts of VIs,
drawings of mechanical components,
detailed mathematical derivations,
etc.