Request for Approval

Description

The request for approval (RFA) is the very first step in successfully completing a senior design project. Once you are assigned a project, your team must submit an RFA through PACE under the My Project page. Once submitted, your project will be placed on the Web Board as a "Project Request" post, and you can also access this same post through the My Project page we used before.

Once you have submitted your RFA, the course staff will provide feedback on your idea (which will appear at the bottom of your project's page), or suggest changes in the scope of the project and ask you to re-submit an RFA. Based on your responses, your project will be approved, or in some cases, rejected. If your project is rejected, this does not mean failure! Your team just needs to resubmit an RFA that meets the expectations of the course staff. This can be done by repeating the above steps.

Once your project is approved, your team will be assigned a project number in the Projects list. Once all the projects are approved, you will also be assigned a dedicated Professor and TA. This would be the time to double check that all the information for your project in the My Project page is correct.

Video Lecture

Video, Slides

Requirements and Grading

The RFA is worth 5 points, graded credit/no credit based on whether your RFA was submitted before the deadline. The RFA is submitted through PACE under the My Project page, and should include the following information:

Projects must be legal and ethical. They must have significant scope and complexity commensurate with the size of the team. This is, of course, a subjective assessment of the course staff. To gain some insight into this judgment, please browse projects from previous semesters. The project must involve the design of signficant systems (cannot just be integration).

Submission and Deadlines

The RFA submission deadline may be found on the Course Calendar.

Quick Tips and Helpful Hints

Posting: Some general project ideas that are fraught with pitfalls:

Growing Degree Day Monitor

Featured Project

The purpose is to create an inexpensive growing degree day monitor that records temperature and computes growing degree days for a specific farming field during a growing season. This monitor will be placed near a farm field where it will monitor temperature conditions during the growing season. It will record both the ambient air and soil temperatures over the course of day. These temperatures will then be used to calculate the growing degree days. The cumulative number of degree days will then be displayed on either a seven-segment display or this can be downloaded to a computer. This monitor will be powered through a combination of both solar and battery power.