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under grad. project ideas

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jam85

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I'm looking to put together a proposal for a new project aimed at sub honours students.

The project ideally will consist of ~5 modules. which can be tested independently using an oscilloscope etc. to discover their properties and will come together at the end of the project to create some final functional piece which the students will feel a sense of achievement for having built.

A module could be as simple as a set of resistors up to filters and the like. preferably there will be few integrated circuits involved (though op-amps would be a good addition).


I was looking into building radio receivers or simple game and the like but so far have come up with little which i think is ideal.

Many thanks for any and all suggestions

has anyone come across plans which fit this description or have any ideas??
 
Depending on your skill levels, a good choice for modular construction is a communications radio, you can develop the IF system, mixers, oscillators etc. seperately, and build them in their own screened boxes, connected via coaxial cable and connectors.
 
A simple game is an equally fitting task, you can add simple functions generators and comparators to create more complex behaviors such as in a pong game, you have sweep generators for the paddles, various mixers and comparators for collision detection and reaction.
 
OK, a radio receiver seems like a good idea. After some stumbling round in the dark I came across the "radio shack special" which i like the sounds of plenty of positive reviews and tunes in to FM which is preferable as there is very little AM broadcasting in my area. I'm struggling to see how it works though does anyone know of a website / book / magazine / journal which explains??
 
OK, a radio receiver seems like a good idea. After some stumbling round in the dark I came across the "radio shack special" which i like the sounds of plenty of positive reviews and tunes in to FM which is preferable as there is very little AM broadcasting in my area. I'm struggling to see how it works though does anyone know of a website / book / magazine / journal which explains??

I thought you were an undergrad student? - you should know how a simple receiver like that works.

Also it would be a pretty poor project for a uni student, more like a 10-11 year old school kid project. I doubt your lecturers would accept it, and if they did, you would almost certainly fail with such a poor choice.
 
I think that depends on the college your at.
I went to a big university my second time around and the actual hands on stuff was way lame. High school level or less. :eek:

However the two year tech college I went to out of high school was super! :)
One class had us do an unregulated power supply running into a regulated one, then that ran a sensor board (choice of light, sound, RF or tempurature) that went to signal amplifier, then out to a display of some sort.
We all had to design everything from start to finish using lab supplied components.
It was scored on complexity functionality, and origionality. ;)
 
OK to give you the full picture:

I am a third year undergrad in Scotland studying for a physics degree. These enquiries are trying to help me with an exercise in putting together a proposal for a new teaching lab. My idea was to develop a lab to replace the present electronics lab.

The current lab consists of 6 2.5 hr session. These really are the first time we are exposed to any electronics after high school and zero knowledge is assumed. They start with an experiment on resistors which demonstrates the internal resistance of various supplies and finishes with some elementary op-amp experiments. so pretty basic.

My idea for improving this was to try to give the whole thing some structure at present you go in and make say a resonant circuit one week take some data plot a graph then it goes in a bag and the next week you do something (seemingly) completely unconnected. These labs were to most people uninteresting, frustrating and we couldn't see the point so my proposal would aim to change that.

unfortunately my knowledge of electronics still goes little further than these labs and I'm trying to access to what extent this proposal is doable before i get to bogged down in the details.

sorry if that was unclear.

so, help....please?



P.S.
If it sounds like i'm clueless its because i am when it comes to this area. I was set this task on wednesday last spent the weekend at a conference giving a talk on quantum cryptography and have to hand in the title and outline for my proposal at 5pm on thursday. Ask me about areas other than electronics and i can promise plethora of information, non of which i could think of a way of including in to a lab better than the ones we all ready have.
 
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