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 time 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:
- A high level summary description of the project’s objectives.
- A system diagram depicting the schematic relationships between all of the different subsystems comprising your final system.
- An account of how you spent your $250 budget. 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.
- A detailed description of electrical design (circuit 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 firmware design with links to complete source code (GitHub or other repository is helpful).
- A detailed description of software design with 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, Google Voice API, etc.)
- Photos or videos of your final system in action.
Although we have used the github platform for hosting webpages in recent PIE offerings (and other classes at Olin), we are aware that having students use GitHub Pages comes with its share of tradeoffs. We are committed to iterating our instructions for setting up and updating GitHub pages as necessary to ensure that more than one member of every project team can shape their team’s page. We do not require all team members to have GitHub accounts, but it is prudent for more than one team member to be versed in maintaining a team project page to prevent possible bottlenecks should a team’s designated website guru be unable to update the team page for any reason during a semester.