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:
- A high-level summary description of the project’s objectives.
- 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 the cost is just your best estimate.
- A data and energy flow diagram that reflects the characteristics of your final design.
- Additional system diagrams as appropriate.
- Include diagrams that your team has made that depict relationships between components of your subsystems.
- These may include electronics schematics, CAD renderings, code UML diagrams, and/or hand-drawings that help us understand connections within and between your software, electrical, and mechanical components.
- Teams do not need to create new documents at this point, but if any of the example document types have previously been created during the semester, it is helpful to include what you have on the team pages.
- Include diagrams that your team has made that depict relationships between components of your subsystems.
- A detailed description of electrical design (whether you have circuit diagrams or not) and any necessary analysis.
- A detailed description of your mechanical design (whether you have CAD images/renderings or not) and any necessary analysis.
- A detailed description of the firmware (e.g., Arduino code) design with links to the complete source code (GitHub or any code repository is helpful).
- A detailed description of software design (whether you have software architecture drawings or not) with links to the complete source code (GitHub or any code repository is helpful). Please be sure to include a list of all external software dependencies (e.g., OpenCV).
- 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 use their GitHub accounts, but it is important that each team member can contribute to the website should they need to. It is prudent for more than one team member to be versed in maintaining a team project page using GitHub pages to prevent possible bottlenecks should a team’s designated website guru be unable to update the team page for any reason during a semester.