Senior design is the culmination of all your years of lab practice and study. You'll work in an interdisciplinary team to create a major design project. Some project ides will come from your own interests; others will be requests from industry, where you might work as an intern.
You'll work with other students to manage your own project. Judging is based on your ability to maintain the schedule and performance objectives you set.
Below are some examples of past SE senior design projects.
Integrated Motion
Team Members:
Curt Albrecht (CE/EE), Rick Allen (CE/SE), Tim Hansen (CE), Tim Schilling (CE)
The Integrated Motion system is a portable glove that will allow users to control a computer’s cursor with his or her hand, giving the user a more natural experience interfacing with the computer. The Integrated Motion system will connect with a computer wirelessly and transmit data concerning all three axes of motion as well as rotational motion.
LightRunner – CE/SE
Team Members: Sean Bogie (CE), Megan Emmer (SE), Joe Joseph (CE), Anthony Pleshek (SE)
Theaterical stage lighting fixtures are typically mounted on catwalks, ceilings or other hard-to-access locations. Technicians setting up a venue in a traditional manner typically encounter one of two problems: one-person jobs that entail frequent trips between the fixture location and the lighting-control board, or two-person jobs that can entail unreliable communication between the fixture operator and the lighting control board operator. LightRunner is a hardware device meant to simplify the configuration of theatrical lighting. An Android application, named MobileRunner, can remotely communicate through Wi-Fi with a LightRunner device to get the status of any fixtures and change their values, removing the need for multiple trips and/or a separate person to adjust the lighting control board. The system is intended for use in small venues and will be low cost, require no configuration to get started, and be small in physical size.
Water Warriors
Team Members: Matthew Cummings (SE), Patrick Donlan (SE), Josh Holtz (SE), Michael Neidinger (SE), Charles Martin Yamat (SE)
Water Warriors is an “app” for Android mobile devices in which players can play a water-themed laser-tag game. The purpose of this project is to provide users with a game in which they may play and interact with anyone else who also has the app installed on their Android device. Through the use of the mobile device’s built-in GPS systems, we are able to calculate when players have hit each other. Within the game, players are able to either join the free-for-all “Global Game” or be able to host and create games with their friends. On the back end, the system stores player stats from game to game as well as provide an easy-to-use means of displaying these stats.
Tap Assisted Projection
Team Members: Joseph Bosas (SE), Seth Pollen (SE), Joshua Pordon (SE), Nathan Radtke (SE)
In 2005-06, a research grant in the EU spurred significant research in the field of tangible acoustic computer interfaces, that is, input devices that use microphones to translate the vibrations from a user’s touch into meaningful computer input, such as a click on a screen. This allows numerous everyday surfaces (such as chalkboards and tabletops) to be converted into sensitive touch screens by the attachment of one or more microphones. Localization of a touch is possible even with just one microphone because a touch at a particular point on the input surface will produce a unique and recognizable acoustic pattern.
The goal of our project has been to build on the technologies developed by this research effort in two distinct ways. First, we have examined techniques to improve the precision of touch localization for inexpensive single-microphone systems in order to make these systems more suitable as general-purpose touch screens. Second, we have explored possible applications of this technology, testing its use on innovative surfaces and developing a set of interesting graphical applications to showcase the power of this technology at future MSOE open house events.
FogBugz Report Generator Plugin
Team Members: Bob Knapp (SE), Anthony Love (SE), Eric Marsch (SE)
The purpose of this project is to provide a convenient way to generate Wiki-based reports for a FogBugz project. Currently FogBugz has many different features that allows for users on a project to get information about cases and time logged against a project. However, FogBugz lacks a convenient way to pull data from the FogBugz database and generate a Wiki-based report presenting this information to the team advisor, or whoever needs the information. This is where our plugin comes in. It allows the user to select the project and it pulls user data for the team members of the project and presents it in a Wiki page in an organized matter. The plugin also allows users to specify planned cases to present what the team plans to work on in the upcoming week, and populates a section in the report to update the progress on the planned cases for the previous week.
Piano Trainer
Team Members: Alex Foran (SE), Nick Gartmann (SE), Corey Grosz (SE), Patrick Larkin (SE)
Piano Trainer is a learning and practice tool for piano. The program has three modes of operation: sheet music, lesson mode and game mode.
Lesson mode allows the user to work through a series of graded lessons focused on expanding and improving their musical skills. Lessons can be presented with any combination of text, graphics and playable music as denoted by the lesson files, which can be custom written and loaded into the application. The sheet music mode allows the user to import a full song using either of two standard formats: MIDI or MusicXML.
These songs can then be played exactly like physical sheet music while the application provides statistical feedback on the user’s performance. Finally, the game mode allows the user to import a music file and play an arcade-style game with the intent of improving the user’s muscle memory. The program is platformindependent and compatible with any MIDI keyboard.
Online Gradebook
Team Members: Steve DeYoung (SE), Grant Lees (SE), John Pires (SE), Paul Schemenauer (SE)
The Online Gradebook (OLGB) is a Web application designed to facilitate storage and tracking of grades for a professor as each course progresses. It was motivated by the need for professors to efficiently manage grades and communicate to students their status in courses. Professors can use the application to enter the information and course work for each of their courses, and can then enter grades for each student they’ve added to the course. For improved flexibility students and professors can use the OLGB to track grades independently of whether their students or professor are also using it. Students often ask professors what grade would be required on remaining exams to achieve a certain grade in the course. The OLGB also addresses this with a Future Outlook feature that predicts a student’s final overall grade taking into account grade estimates for incomplete course work.