ECE 4 Design for Freshmen
  Course overview
 


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Quarter: Spring 2007
Lectures: Mondays & Wednesdays 3:30-4:45  Building 387 Room # 104
Laboratory: Fridays 11.00- 2.00 at ENGR 5162C or the UCSB lagoon
                  (Lab slot could be modified if conflicting with other freshmen classes)

Instructor: Rakesh K Lal
TA: Yan Zheng
Area Expert: Dr Lisa Stratton

Course Overview

This first course on design has been designed to give freshmen an intuitive introduction to engineering design. You will learn how to take an idea of a system and convert it to a working model. Plus you will learn about hardware and software as you build your systems. You would be provided sensors, electronic components & modules and computers with interface cards & data acquisition software to realize your ideas. And you would receive the attention one gets in a small class environment so that your learning curve is steep and you are able to realize your designs.  For Spring 2007, the theme of the designs would be Monitoring the UCSB lagoon.

We will begin with a broad introduction to design and a trip to the lagoon -- get your cameras to capture images that you might wish to upload to the course wiki or blog or for your journal. Next we'll use Lego Mindstroms kits to learn how one can pick up signals from the real world and program a Lego device to do some simple operations. We would then have a lecture on the UCSB Lagoon by Dr Stratton an area expert. In the subseqent lectures and discussions we would learn to come up with the first round design of a system for recording various physical and chemical parameters that reserachers would like to monitor in the UCSB lagoon. After these introductory lectures and discussions plus experiments with equipment and tools you would need for designing and testing your systems, we would take a hands-on approach to design.

A more detailed course plan  is attached and you might want to get a broad picture of the lagoon by taking a tour and reading a presentation written by UCSB students Walson Lawi & Ardit Velia. Plus get a weath of more technical information by reading about its profile and visiting links in the profile that take you to other conservation wet land sites in California.

Work & grading

The points distribution for grading gives you the gist of the work elements for this course:

- Your course journal: 10
- Laboratory work: 20
- Participation, teamwork and contributing to the course wiki: 20
- Mid-term design review: 20
- Final demo, presentation and documentation: 30

You can see that there is a fair amount of learning and interesting work spread over the term that enables you to learn a suite of skills that are important professionally.

For: Freshmen in ECE (this year we are planning for a class of less than twenty -- a dozen would be ideal!).

Pre-requisites: Introduction to programming at K-12 level; Math 3A & 3B with a C- or better grade.

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