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Students working on this year’s electrical and computer engineering capstone project are learning about the industry while tackling real-world engineering problems. This semester, they are designing a prototype controller for an urban transit system.
The students will hold a public presentation and demonstration of the prototype at 11 a.m. April 28, in Acopian Engineering Center room 429.
The senior design course presents students with an industrial problem that they might encounter out in the workforce. The course is completely hands-on with a final product which is designed by the students. Advising the students are John Greco, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Christopher Nadovich, lab director for electrical and computer engineering.
“A very common question put to engineers in job interviews is: ‘what real-world projects have you worked on?’” explains Nadovich. “We give our graduates an excellent answer. This project enables the students to get as close to a real world engineering project experience as we can put them.”
The project also reflects Lafayette’s distinctive status as a liberal arts college with an outstanding engineering program, as the students must also learn skills outside the engineering field to succeed.
“[The students gain] the ability to think creatively within the confines of technical and non-technical constraints,” Nadovich says. “They also find that they must contribute in areas they may have studied in previous classes as well as in new areas they may have never before encountered, both within the specialty of electrical and computer engineering as well as in other disciplines.”
The students have organized themselves into teams to design the prototype, including overall management, data communication, power management, analog conditioning, and digital control requirements, all of which are constrained by explicit limits on time and cost. Also, the prototype system must pass industry testing for safety, reliability, maintainability, ethics, and sustainability.
“The students have designed the overall organization of the system, and all lower-level details of its operation,” says Greco. “They also presented their preliminary and critical design reviews to an audience that included two off-campus engineers, one of which was electrical and computer engineering graduate Karl Metzlaar ’95.”
Seniors involved in the project include Serdar Benderli (Antalya, Turkey), John Mumo (Nairobi, Kenya), Hasan Khan (Swarthmore, Pa.), and Taha Jiwaji (Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania), who are also majoring in economics and business; Emily Frank (Bedford, Mass.), who is also majoring in international studies; Steven Bauer (Concord, Mass.), Thomas Blenk (Inwood, N.Y.), Kelly Koreyva (Washington Crossing, Pa.), Jeffery Letoski (Hanover Township, Pa.), James Mintzer (Bethlehem, Pa.), Shrijan Rajkarnikar (Kathmandu, Nepal), Austin Robison (Flourtown, Pa.), Daniel Sheehan (Winchester, Mass.), Alexandra Sippin (Fairfield, Conn.), and Evan St. Jean (Hanover, Mass.).