Embedded Systems Design
You have been hired as a consulting engineer to develop various embedded systems. For these consulting contracts, bids were requested for the design and development of embedded systems as well as the generation of all documentation necessary to allow the funding agency's software/hardware professionals to fully develop your project idea. You wrote a proposal for this project, in which you promised to deliver a fully-tested embedded system to the developers, along with a written report and a proof-of-concept prototype demonstration.
In your bid to work on the project, you proposed a total salary budget of $2,000. As undergraduate electrical engineering students with some embedded systems design experience, you bill at a rate of $40/hour (sans overhead). Thus, you have a maximum of 50 billable hours per student.
Deliverables include a report, a short presentation, and the prototype if any. The management team. has requested both a paper copy and an electronic version of your Technical Data Package (i.e., design documents). A WinZip file containing all documents and source codes, along with a readme.doc file containing a brief explanation of each file, Do not spend more than the budgeted amount of time on this project
- an important component of engineering consulting work is learning how to budget your time properly, to delegate tasks, and to do your best possible work under the budget/ time/ resource constraints of the contract.
Design Specifications:
• For the final project, an embedded system involving software/hardware co-development must be proposed.
• You can use any microcontroller or microcomputer.
• If peripherals/interfaces are needed, they may be constructed on solderless breadboards.
• A description of your test plan and a brief interpretation of the results must be included within the final project report. If the embedded system is not completely done, write about the techniques that you can use to test the final design.
• Log hours worked on the final project, dividing the billable hours into the following categories: (1) research and planning; (2) algorithm development and circuits; (3) simulation and laboratory testing; and (4) documentation. Do not exceed the allotted number of hours.