• ECE 511 Home
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• My Mason
• Jens-Peter Kaps

• George Mason University
• The Volgenau School of Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
George Mason University
Engineering Building 3100
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
Voice: (703) 993-1569
Fax: (703) 993-1601
E-mail: ece@gmu.edu

Project Specifications

The Project Specifications should be an outline of your project. They need to clearly specify what the goal of your project is and how you are planning to accomplish it. Furthermore, they need to detail what hardware components you are planning on using and how they are going to interface with the MSP 430. All features of the MSP 430 that you are planning on using (timer, ADC, etc.) need to be listed including for what purpose they will be used.

Progress Report 1

• Title Slide: Title, Group Members, etc.
• Overview Slide: Big picture, what are you trying to build and why.
• Block Diagram Slide: Show how all components attach to the MSP430
• Component Slides: (one per component)
• Name and type of component
• Hardware interface of component
• How to address it from software
• Progress with component (i.e. ordered, acquired, tested, done)
• Challenges
• Project Status Slide:
• Task division amongst team members.
• Overall progress
• Plan B, i.e. what problems do you foresee, what alternative do you have.

Progress Report 2

Your 5 minute presentation should contain:

• Title Slide: Title, Group Members, etc.
• Overall Status
• Component Slides: (one per component)
• Name and type of component
• Hardware interface of component used
• How you interfaced it with software
• Progress with component (i.e. ordered, acquired, tested, done)
• Challenges
• Project Status Slide:
• Task division amongst team members.
• Overall progress (e.g. parts are working, still need to integrate .... PCB built and tested
• Plan B, i.e. what problems did you encounter, what alternative do you have.

Project Presentation

An important part of the project is the presentation. Here you will explain to the class and the general audience what the goal of your project is and how you have solved it. Explain it from the top level first and then drill down into the components. Keep in mind that the most impressive part to the audience is, how much you have accomplished with such few components and in such a little time of only 1 semester. Below is a rough outline that you can follow.

The presentations will be held in conference style sessions with refreshment breaks in a yet to be announced seminar room. You are required to present your paper and attend at least two session. The presentations will be open to the general public and ECE students can get seminar credit for attending a session (though you can't get session credit for the session in which you are presenting).

The time is limited to 15 minutes including presentation plus 5 for questions and answers. Please re-hearse your presentation at least twice to make sure that you can present within these time constraints. Unlike during the progress presentations, the time limit will be strictly enforced. In order to assure a speedy change-over from group to group and to facilitate demonstrations of your project, please upload the presentations to the presentation laptop at the latest in the break before your session and also setup your demonstration at that time.

• Title Slide
• Motivation
• Overview
• Block Diagram
• Hardware Description
• Software Description
• Results
• Demonstration

Project Report and Final Submission

Always remember that a good project must go along with a good report. The final report should be single spaced, 10 pt font, 1 inch margins, letter sized paper. Please limit the text part of your report to a maximum of 8 pages (not including the appendix), fewer pages are fine.

Here are some hints for the project report:

• The project has to have a title and names of all team members.
• A short abstract should summarize what the motivation, goal, and achievement.
• A brief table of contents.
• The contents should include:
  • Motivation: what is the purpose of your project.
  • Your solution to the problem stated in the motivation including a top-level block diagram (not a schematic!).
  • Description of all parts shown in the block diagram including how they are interfaced, what MSP430 feature was used, how does your software interact with each part, etc.
  • Results and Conclusions including lessons learned. Describe precisely how far you got in the project i.e., what does work, and which parts are not fully functioning.
• The Appendix should contain:
• List of team members and their tasks
• Complete parts list
• Full schematic
• PCB layout (if done)
• A suggestion: For reports using LaTeX is a good idea. It is installed on all lab machines and freely available for your PC. (Using LaTeX is not a requirement.)

The final submission has to be submitted via MyMason as a single zip file and include:

• Project Report
• Schematic
• PCB layout (if done)
• All sourcecode written for this project

Copyright © 2008-2023 Jens-Peter Kaps
Last updated: 12/24/11