Design Document Check

updated Fa 2020

Description

The Design Document Check (DDC) is intended to aid your team as it prepares its Design Document. The DDC focuses narrowly upon providing feedback on the preparation of historically problematic Design Document elements. If these elements fall short during your Design Review the following week, precious time is lost.

What are the course staff looking for? i) Evidence that the overall idea of the design is sound; ii) A check of a small subset of required components indicates that the project is on the right track.

The DDC provides feedback on your preparation of the following Design Document elements:

  1. Introduction
    1. Start with a brief summary (30 sec) or elevator pitch following this template:

      I will build ___A___ (my core product) for ___B___ (my core customer: the person who pays my company or uses the product).

      My customer has a problem ___C___ (describe the problem your customer has)

      My product solves my customer’s problem by ___D___ (how do you solve the problem?)

    2. Be expected to explain further what the problem is, what’s your idea to solve it, and why your idea is novel.
  2. High-level Requirements
    1. HL requirements are derived from the problem you are trying to solve (put yourself into the customer's shoes). HL requirements should be the essential features that your customers/users really care about. These features distinguish your product from others (e.g. ones available in the market or previous 445 designs). Be abstract (no tech details, you may come up with different design due to other constraints but still solve this problem), quantifiable (no words like continuously, accurately, etc), and unambiguous. HL&RV slides(P.5) has a good example.
    2. We will look at your HL requirements and check if they are what your customers/users really care about. Be prepared to defend your requirements, so that when you get challenged, you can give a well thought out explanation.
  3. Block Diagram
    1. Block Diagram slides
    2. We will check whether this design appears to solve your problem. 
    3. We will check if formatting is clear (lines, legends, etc). Extra caution is needed as students often make mistakes here (but you shouldn't!).
  4. Physical Design (if applicable)
  5. Requirements & Verification Tables
    1. HL&RV slides: from P. 1-17
    2. Block Module Requirements: Break down your HL requirements into block level requirements. These are the requirements in the RV table (they are not the specs of the parts you have chosen).
    3. Verification: A step-by-step approach allows another 445 student to test if the BL requirement is satisfied. This is like an instruction for your module's unit test (with some surrounding dummy modules, a.k.a, mock object(s)
    4. We will review one piece of it. Show us an important one.
  6. Plots
  7. Circuit Schematics
  8. Tolerance Analysis
    1. Identify an important part that you need to perform some quantitative analysis on. This part should have quantitative values critical to the design and require you do calculations and make trade-offs in order to achieve your best design.
    2. Common mistake: Many students do calculations for tangential parts to pad the space.
  9. Safety & Ethics
  10. Citations

During the DDC, your team will have 5-8 minutes to present an example of each of these elements. Expect to share the 30-minute DDC session with two other design teams. Come prepared to learn from their work - both the good and bad.

Your task is to prepare and upload the above elements in a single PDF document to the course website. During your DDC session, you will present directly from your submission, which will be projected for all to see.

The focus of the DDC is not on the details of your design but rather on the details of your formatting; the design of your project will be covered in-depth during the Design Review. Organize your submission in accordance with the Design Document guidance and the example Design Document.

The course staff will focus on providing feedback on the format of your sample DDC elements - the very limited available time will not afford detailed feedback on your design. Please go to office hours for further guidance.

Requirements and Grading

Upload your DDC submission to your project page on PACE (i.e. ECE 445 web board) before arriving at your DDC session.

As in your Design Document, number pages after the title page in your DDC submission.

An example DDC submission is provided here for reference. The corresponding Design Document for this DDC submission can be found on the Design Document assignment page.

Any material obtained from websites, books, journal articles, or other sources not originally generated by the project team must be appropriately attributed with properly cited sources in a standardized style such as IEEE, ACM, APA, or MLA.

The course staff at the DDC will assign individual grades to each student based on:

Submission and Deadlines

Sign-up for the Design Document Check on the ECE 445 course website - specifically at the Sign up for Team Presentation item on the PACE tab. Sign-up will open the Monday one week prior to the DDCs.

Upload your DDC submission (.pdf format) to the ECE 445 course website before your DDC session - specifically at the My Project item on the PACE tab.

While you will not complete peer reviews during the DDC, you are expected to actively contribute to the discussion.

Tech must-know and FAQ for design

Here is the link of "Tech must-know and FAQ for design" which is accessible after logging into g.illinois.edu.

Over semesters, ECE445 course staff have encountered repeated mistakes from students. The document above is designed to provide students with the essential knowledge needed in order to have a good design. Spending 5 min reading it might save you 15 hours later. Also, there might be some quiz questions in your DDC or Design Review. Please help us improve this document. We value your feedback!

Fountain show

Dingyi Feng, Tianli Ling, Zhelun Lu, Shibo Zhang

Featured Project

## Team

- Dingyi Feng(dingyif2)

- Tianli Ling(tling3)

- Zhelun Lu(zhelunl2)

- Shibo Zhang(shiboz2)

## Problem:

A fountain show on campus can make students feel more relaxed after class. However, some fountain shows only have monotonous, stiff, and single actions. Besides, they cannot automatically generate action and light effects. Compared with large fountain shows, small and medium-sized fountain shows have the advantage of time and space. In most cases, a large fountain show only has preloaded music which cannot be decided by audiences. Large fountain shows also require people to design the action and light effects for each music, which takes lots of time and effort. Compared with the large fountain show, our small fountain show will be more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, large fountain shows might result in large crowds gathering, but a small fountain show can reduce the risk of infection.

## Solution Overview:

Our fountain show would be built at a pool on the sourthwest of the main lake on campus. By manually programing, the fountain show could realize changing lighting effects and movements. Besides, our fountain show could also identify the music which was imported into our system, and automatically generate the lighting effects and movements with the music. If time permits, we will strengthen the human-computer interaction of our product. To be specific, people could scan the QR code or use our online system to choose the music they want, so that they can enjoy the fountain show at any time.

## Solution Components:

### Control Subsystem:

- Music colleccting and analyzing subsystem: Computer that can import music signals and analyze them.

- Converting subsystem: After music signal is analyzed, we need computer to convert useful signals into digital signals. Digital signals will be used to control LEDs and other mechanical subsystems.

### Mechanical Subsystem:

- Pump Subsystem: Water pump that can pump water from the lake. Valves will be used to control water’s flow rate of each nozzle.

- Lighting Subsystem: LEDs are needed to light our fountains. They are controlled by microprocessor on PCB. Their brightness and color can be changed with music.

- Motor Subsystem: Two motors are needed for each fountain nozzle to control the movements. The motors are controlled by microprocessor on PCB.

### Power subsystem:

- The pump is drived by DC power (12V 20~30A). PCB and computer will be drived by USB (5V 1A). Full module power supply with 12V and 5V output is needed.

## Criterion for Success:

- If it can successfully identify a piece of music and convert it to electrical signals that we need in controlling LED’s lighting and nozzle’s moving.

- If the whole system can work stably for a long time and whether it is safe to use without electric leakage or other problems.

- If music playing, fountain movements and LED lights are synchronized.

- If the fountain system is neat and whether the fountain performance is ornamental enough.