Students enrolled in the Principles of Integrated Engineering course at Olin College maintain public facing websites for team projects for three main reasons:
- Grading - the teaching team reviews the project team pages during final grading, to revisit a given team’s trajectory through the course.
- Inspiring - future students and other curious creators are likely to search these pages when looking for ideas on how to build class and/or personal projects.
- Showcasing - PIE projects are often included in student portfolios to demonstrate teaming and prototyping skills as well as design prowess resulting from making tradeoffs appropriate for the project constraints.
The teaching team typically encourages teams to view their project pages as a resource for empowering anyone with comparable access to materials and equipment who have basic comfort with integrating code, embedded electronics, and mechanical prototypes to re-create a team's project. Pages should also include decisions made during the course of the project that the course's limited timeline and budget influenced - so that others may explore some of the alternate paths considered should they have different timelines and financial constraints.
Your final project website should accomplish these two objectives:
- Thoroughly document your project - design, technical, and appropriate process work.
- Develop media that is suitably polished to represent your finished work publicly on the web.
Your final project site is required to contain the following elements:
- Clear communication with human proofread text - no AI generated text is allowed.
- A high-level summary description of the project’s objectives.
- Photos and/or videos of your final system in action. (Should the final system be unable to perform any actions at the time you are making your website, show how your last integrated prototype worked, explain what you suspect to be the problem that prevented further demonstrations.)
- Discussion of your design process including trade-offs made along the way and rationale for the final design you chose (explaining why your choices were superior to other options for reasons such as budget considerations, existing familiarity with a system. availability of parts etc).
- A system diagram depicting the relationships between all of the different subsystems comprising your final system. This can be represented however makes sense to the team, through hand-drawings, whiteboard sketches, or UMP diagrams. Teams should have developed sufficient documents through the previous project phases and we do not anticipate teams needing to create (multiple) new documents at this point.
- A data and energy flow diagram that reflects the characteristics of your final design.
- A detailed description of electrical design (circuit/schematic diagrams are appropriate) and any necessary analysis.
- A detailed description of your mechanical design (CAD images/renderings are appropriate) and any necessary analysis.
- A detailed description of the software and firmware design swith links to complete source code (github or other repository is helpful). Please be sure to include a list of all external software dependencies (eg. OpenCV, a RaspPI OS, etc.)
- An account of how you spent your $250 budget, ideally in a bill of materials. You must include all components and materials and their estimated costs (even if you obtained them for free somehow). Please note where something was obtained for free and cost is just your best estimate. We want to see the total cost of a project if a team at another school had to remake your project and did not have access to free materials.