BYU StarTrek Senior Project

	Fall 2007 ECEn 490 Senior Project: Space Education Center Activity
	To boldly go where no senior project has gone before... Next offered: Fall 2008.
	Class Meeting Time: Thursday, 1:00-1:50 for technical lecture related to this project, 381 CB; Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-12:50 for general Senior Project lecture, 381 CB. Final: Saturday, 16 Dec. 2007, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

	Instructor:
	Professor David Long Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University 459 Clyde Building, Provo, Utah 84602 Voice: (801) 422-4382 Email: long@ee.byu.edu

	Overview
	In this journey to the stars, you will be one of the first to go where no one has gone before. You will be designing a Star Trek-style Fiber Optic Circuit activity center to support the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center in Pleasant Grove, Utah. The project is an interdisciplinary team project which includes an embedded micro controller, optical circuitry, control software, an http-based ethernet interface, and a unique human interface. A minimum of two teams of 3 people are required. As part of this project we deliver real, functional, packaged systems to a real customer who uses them to teach and train kids for years to come. This is a unique and fun project you can be proud of! For Fall 2007 we will be developing additional Star-Trek style activity control panels, though other projects may be considered. You will be designing the human interface, developing eletrical and mechanical interfaces for an emedded controller, programing the controller, and fabricating the enclosures and optical circuity. This will require mechanical design and fabrication as well as electrical circuitry and software development. While there are no formal 400 level course requirements for this particular project, students will be working with an innovative human interface, packaging, simple optics, an embedded microprocessor, web pages, digital signals and computer programming. Thus, students should have taken at least one course touching on one or more of these topics. Practical experience in design and building circuit boards, woodworking, circuit board layout, numerically controlled milling, and/or mechanical design is an important plus. Note: Enrollment is limited to 20/semester. Here is what we expect students to have demonstrated by taking this course (Competencies): Ability to take high level, customer requirements, identify from them the specifications a solution must meet, and formulate those specifications as an engineering problem. Ability to complete a significant culminating design that draws upon the knowledge gained in prerequisite courses. Ability to maintain a team portfolio documenting the design process. Ability to give an oral presentation describing team progress during a design review. Ability to produce a written report describing a technical design. Ability to give an oral presentation describing a technical design.
	Misc. Documents: Pictures from the Space Center Final report/presentation requirements First Presentation Evaluation form (.doc file)

Past Year's Projects

In the past we have designed and constructed a number of different Star-Trek style consoles, activity centers, isolinear chip panels, and Tricoder systems. Recently, we built a flexible, mult-board system designed to support customized "retro" starship designs. Here are some pictures of past projects:

Retro Ship and Console