Design Review

Video Lecture

Video, Slides

Description

The design review is a 30-minute meeting intended to ensure that the team has a successful project. Students will present (using slides in tandem with their design document) and defend their design while instructors critique it, ask questions, and indentify any infeasible or unsafe aspects. Note that the instructors are not here to attack your design, but to straightforwardly inform you when you may be heading down an unsuccessful path.

Instructors and TAs will ask questions throughout and may choose the order of the blocks to be discussed. Specifically, here is what the course staff are primarily looking for:

  1. Evidence that the overall design and high-level requirements solve the problem stated.
  2. Check if the overall design has suitable difficulty for course standards and completion in one semester. Scope may need to be adjusted if otherwise.
  3. Check team members' engineering preparedness to implement each module.
  4. Check that each team member is assigned an equal portion of the project effort.

Prepare for the following sequence.

  1. Promptly project your slides or other content on projector.
  2. Introduce team members (name, major, and the project part each is in charge of).
  3. Present problem statement and proposed solution (<1 minutes) following the template in DDC (see Description 1.a)
  4. Present design overview (<5 minutes)
    1. High-level requirements: check DDC
    2. Block diagram: check DDC
    3. Physical design
  5. For the remainder of the review, you will participate in a detailed discussion of the design. Plan to cover each block, one at a time, beginning with the most critical. The course staff will ask questions and may step in to guide the discussion. Be prepared to discuss all aspects of your design with a focus on the following.
    1. Requirements & Verification: (see DDC); We'll look at all the important block requirements. Prepare to justify the components chosen and compare with important alternatives.
    2. Evidence that the design meets requirements (use the following as applicable)
      • Simulations
      • Calculations
      • Measurements
      • Schematics
      • Flowcharts
      • Mechanical drawings
      • Tolerance analysis: check DDC
      • Schedule: Suggestions:
        1. Think about what you can do in parallel, what has to be sequential;
        2. Work on hardware before software;
        3. Perform unit testing before system testing;
        4. Unit test each module on a breadboard before starting PCB design);
        5. Leave margin for unexpected delays or accidents. You are mostly responsible for those exceptions, just as if you were the owner of this senior design business;
      • Cost:hourly rate is ~$50 not $10. In addition, apply the 2.5x overhead multiplier ($125/hr is the cost of your senior design business), which includes the cost of salaries of you, your boss, CxOs, sales, janitors, etc.

Grading

The DR Grading Rubric is available to guide your DR preparation. Two sample Design Review documents are available as examples of what we expect: a Good Sample DR, a Moderate Sample DR, and a good example R&V table as it was presented in a final report. Notes are made in red type to point out what is lacking. Note that the grading rubrics and point structure may have evolved since these reports were generated, so use them only as a guide as to what we are generally expecting.

Submission and Deadlines

Your design review presentation should be ready before your Design Review. You do not need to upload this powerpoint to the course website. You will be graded on your live presentation on the day of the Design Review with the course staff.

A crowd-sourcing urban air quality monitoring system with bikes

Kaiwen Hong, Zhengxin Jiang, Haofan Lu, Haoqiang Zhu

Featured Project

**Problem**

For public bike users, someone may concern about the air quality in which they are currently riding, as well as the places they are going to. However, currently there is no such an air quality monitoring system which provides air quality information in specific areas inside a city such as Haining.

**Solution Overview**

The idea is to apply air quality monitoring devices on the public bike system. The public bike system in Haining is a perfect carrier for IoT (Internet of Things) devices and urban sensing since it has a large and stable user group and all bikes are managed by official organization which means unified modification on all bikes can be done. A monitoring device integrated on the bike can provide the real-time information that users want to know and share data with other users through a cloud server. A real-time air quality map can be created for users with the contribution from all running bikes.

**Solution Components**

Subsystem 1 – on-bike air quality monitoring device. The subsystem is a stm32 microcontroller based design, integrated with air contaminant sensor, speed meter and data transmission modules. Once connected to a smartphone, the subsystem will keep transmitting real-time data to the smartphone.

Subsystem 2 – Software include a user interface and a server. The user interface can be either an app or a website on smartphone. The user interface receives sensor data from the hardware subsystem, displays the real-time statistics, uploads sensor data to server and receives the air quality map from server. The server processes data from all running bikes, creates a real-time air quality map and returns it back to users.

**Criterion for Success**

1. Success of data collection: stable real-time statistic display on user interface, stable data collection on server.

2. Air quality visualization: The air quality map correctly reflects the air quality in Haining city. For example, the concentration of air contamination should be higher in heavy traffic than in intl campus.

3. Speed control: The on-bike device or smartphone should give an alert when the monitored speed exceeds the upper limit or the user set range. This is not the core function of our design, but we add it as we think the function makes sense for safety purpose.