“How I engineered the product design – not a description of the product”

 

1)      INTRODUCTION

a)      Describe the problem area you decided to work in.  If your project was totally completed, what would be the typical usage scenario.

b)      Describe the actual solution you achieved – this lets the reader know what to expect in what follows.

c)      Give a review of the remaining chapters of the thesis

2)      REVIEW OF PREVIOUS WORK

a)      In the case where you are building a product, describe similar products that are available – in both the commercial and research arenas.  Attempt to derive a table comparing the characteristics (both good and bad) of existing products.

3)      DERIVE THE SPECIFICATIONS

a)      From an examination of the dream product and existing products, derive a set of design specifications.  Detail the process of how you broke the original system into subsystems (recursively) and give the specifications for each of the final subsystems.  You should not mention any implementation details, other than those imposed on the original design by your supervisor.  For example, you may derive the fact that you need an 8-bit micro, but you should not decide which micro at this time.

4)      HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION

a)      From the specification in Chapter 3, select components and comment on hardware implementation.

5)      SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION

a)      From the specifications in Chapter 3 and any relevant hardware details of Chapter 4, describe how you went about performing the software implementation.

6)      PRODUCT EVALUATION or “How good is it?”

a)      Detail how well you final implementation described in Chapters 4 and 5 meets the design specifications of Chapter 3.  Detail the testing procedures you designed to determine the closeness of the match.  Show the results (tables and graphs).

b)      Details how well you (the engineer) performed – what were your strengths and weaknesses.  What additional skills did you have to gain in order to complete your project?  How could you address your weaknesses? 

7)      FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

a)      You have completed version 1.0 of the product.  What would you do if you now how to design and implement version 2.0?  What would you do the same?  What would you do differently?

8)      CONCLUSION

a)      Provide a brief overview of the project – what did you set out to do?  What did you achieve?  How well did it perform?

9)      APPENDICES