AC 2012-4195: MODERNIZING THE MICROCONTROLLER LABORA-TORY WITH LOW-COST AND OPEN-SOURCE TOOLSProf. K. Joseph Hass, Bucknell University K. Joseph Hass was a Distinguished Member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked in embedded signal processing and radiation-tolerant microelectronics, before beginning his career in academia. He joined the Microelectronics Research Center at the University of New Mexico and continued his work on radiation-tolerant microelectronics, adding an emphasis on unique signal pro- cessing architectures, reconfigurable computing elements, and ultra-low-power CMOS electronics. The research group at UNM moved to the University of Idaho, where Hass studied memory
AC 2012-3915: STRUCTURING A SYSTEM DESIGN LABORATORY COURSETO FACILITATE OUTCOMES ASSESSMENTProf. Victor P. Nelson, Auburn University Victor P. Nelson is a professor and Assistant Chair of electrical and computer engineering at Auburn University. His primary research interests include embedded systems and computer-aided design and testing of digital systems and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). He is co-author of the textbook Digital Logic Circuit Analysis and Design and a tutorial book on fault-tolerant computing. He has been Chair of the ECE Curriculum Committee, Coordinator of the ECE Graduate Program, and served one year as Associate Dean for Assessment in the College of Engineering. He is a
for Engineering Education, 2012 Distributed Laboratories: Control System Experiments with LabVIEW and the LEGO NXT PlatformAbstract:This paper explores the inclusion of control system experiments into lecture-based introductorySystems and Controls courses. The experiments are implemented in two modes: as an in-classexperiment and as a take-home project. The LEGO NXT kit with LabVIEW software is theplatform. The experiment is supported by a website that includes a tutorial on the fundamentaltheoretical concepts, a video tutorial on the operation, and an online test representative ofquestions the students might be asked on an exam in the course. A discussion of the assessmentmethods for this laboratory module is included
mask important operational limitations such as op-amp slew-rate nonlinearities for higher frequency sinusoidal inputs.This paper presents some of the successful measurement methodologies that our students use atthe U.S. Coast Guard Academy in a junior-level Linear Circuits laboratory. As part of this lab,students use the Agilent 35670 Dynamic Signal Analyzer (DSA) to measure some of thespecifications of an inverting amplifier op-amp (µA741) circuit. They use averaging on themeasurement data to minimize the impact of noise in the measurements of the µA741circuit.Here we present typical measurement results, along with informal student feedback that suggeststo us that the “real-time” nature of a DSA frequency domain presentation (that looks
AC 2012-3227: COMMON MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROTOTYPES OF RE-MOTE LABORATORIES IN THE EDUCATIONAL CURRICULA OF ELEC-TRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERINGMr. Mohamed Tawfik, Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) Mohamed Tawfik received a M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED), Madrid, Spain, and a B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Ain Shams Univer- sity, Cairo, Egypt, in 2011 and 2008, respectively. He is an IEEE member since 2009. He is a Research Associate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC) at UNED. He is author\co- author of more than 18 publications, including conference papers, book chapters, and journal articles on remote
AC 2012-3351: DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FUNDAMEN-TAL ELECTRIC MACHINE LABORATORY USING INDUSTRIAL DE-VICESDr. Jae-Do Park, University of Colorado, Denver Jae-Do Park received his Ph.D. degree from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 2007. Park is currently an Assistant Professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, Denver. He is interested in various energy and power system research and education areas, including electric ma- chines and drives, energy storage and harvesting systems, renewable energy sources, and grid-interactive distributed generation systems. Prior to his arrival at the University of Colorado, Denver, Park worked for Pentadyne Power Corporation in
AC 2012-3980: INCREASING HANDS-ON LABORATORY EQUIPMENTEXPERIENCE VIA ROTATION OF NOTEBOOK RECORDING DUTIESDr. Peter Mark Jansson P.E., Bucknell University Peter Mark Jansson is currently an Associate Professor of electrical engineering at Bucknell University. Prior to joining Bucknell, he was with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rowan University and spent nearly 20 years in professional engineering in large and small firms and as a consul- tant. He received his B.S. degree from MIT, an M.S.E. from Rowan University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and has more than 33 years of professional and academic experience in renewable energy and power systems
AC 2012-4159: INTRODUCING LABORATORIES WITH SOFT PROCES-SOR CORES USING FPGAS INTO THE COMPUTER ENGINEERINGCURRICULUMProf. David Henry Hoe, University of Texas, Tyler David Hoe received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. He held a position as a Staff Engineer at the General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center for five years prior to assuming his current position as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Texas, Tyler, in 2008. Page 25.844.1 c American Society for Engineering Education, 2012
AC 2012-5331: COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE FUNCTIONALITY ANDCOST EFFECTIVENESS OF ELECTRONIC LABORATORY VIRTUALINSTRUMENTATIONSDr. Lars K. Hansen, University of Texas, San AntonioMr. Keith Gerard Delahoussaye Jr., University of Texas, San Antonio Keith Delahoussaye is a student at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He is a member of the Multifunc- tional Electronic Materials Devices Research Lab of the Electrical Engineering Department. He is also a member of IEEE’s student chapter. Before graduation, he worked full-time for the U.S. Air Force as an Avionic Technician in the status of an Air Reserve Technician. He is hopeful to be an electronic/electrical engineering governmental employee. He is married and a proud
introductory ECEclass. An appropriate laboratory exercise may support this concept and spark student interest inthe subject matter. A logical choice is to present a “wireless” project as it naturally includes theconcept of complex impedances.Building a basic radio receiver on the protoboard is a challenge due to instability of the RF low-noise amplifier within an unpredictable protoboard environment. Our numerous attempts to buildan AM station receiver on the protoboard have indicated the following difficulties:1. The circuit can be built by the instructor and by those skilled in the field from the class, but not by all class students.2. The design is difficult to debug; sometimes the flawless circuit simply does not function.3. One critical point
Technology (ABET) undergraduate programs offered nationwide thatrequire students to conduct laboratory sessions onsite. For some students this arrangement maybe inconvenient, or in some cases, impractical. Furthermore, there are many challengesassociated with teaching electrical engineering online courses because of the interposition ofheavy equation use and interactivity required.Over the past three years, we have been investigating the use of inexpensive, highly portableinstrumentation to facilitate our lab requirements. As a result of this enabling technology, anonline program targeted toward completing the second two years of an undergraduate electricalengineering degree is being piloted at our institution. Nearly 109 students have participated
dilutes both these components. Moreover, as the professionalengineering topics are required for graduation, students cannot replace the capstone designcourse with other opportunities closer to their professional interests, for example, completing aproject in the Student Space Programs Laboratory. Page 25.403.2Following a critical review and discussion of the design component of our curriculum, theundergraduate committee identified three areas for improvement: (1) coupling the undergraduateand graduate programs by engaging undergraduates in faculty research projects, (2) diversifyingthe spectrum and depth of capstone design projects, and (3
based approach.2 Online classes are simply treated as extensions of an oncampus course. In summer 2010, we set out to create a pedagogical model that could be used forour online courses. This model is designed to be tailored specifically for the online setting andreplaces the typical satellite model used in online education. In Summer 2010, we applied thesatellite model for an electrical circuits course, in which students viewed pre-recorded lecturesand worked on the same laboratory, homework, and examinations as traditional students. TheSummer 2010 course is used as a benchmark to measure our progress in the Summer 2011course.In the design of our methodology, we sought to make key changes to the way a course is taught.We sought to deemphasize
education research and engineering outreach camps. Yilmaz is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu Electrical Engineering Honor Society, as well as IEEE and ASEE.Dr. Selahattin Ozcelik, Texas A&M University, KingsvilleProf. Nuri Yilmazer, Texas A&M University, Kingsville Nuri Yilmazer received a B.S. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey in 1996, and M.S. and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Uni- versity of Florida and Syracuse University in 2000 and 2006, respectively. He worked as a Post Doctoral Research Associate in Computational Electromagnetics Laboratory at Syracuse University from 2006 to 2007. He is currently working as an Assistant
that evaluation, reassess and refine their work. 6. Recognize the importance of group collaboration, including oral and written communication.EE101 ScheduleThe new three-credit course was designed for a Tuesday/Thursday meeting schedule (1.5hrs/meeting). Tuesdays’ meetings consisted of lectures (by instructors and studentgroups), in-class exercises, quizzes, and exams. Thursday meetings were devoted tohands-on laboratory work.The course schedule for Fall of 2011 was structured as follows: Week Lecture (Tuesday) Lab modules (Thursday) 1 (8/24 – 8/26) No lecture Speaker + AM radio 2 (8/29 – 9/2) Intro to ECE
AC 2012-4521: MOBILE STUDIO PEDAGOGY, PART 2: SELF-REGULATEDLEARNING AND BLENDED TECHNOLOGY INSTRUCTIONProf. Kenneth A Connor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Kenneth Connor is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering where he teaches courses on plasma physics, electromagnetics, electronics and instrumentation, electric power, and general engineering. His research involves plasma physics, electromagnetics, photonics, engineering education, diversity in the engineering workforce, and technology enhanced learning. Since joining the Rensselaer faculty in 1974, he has been continuously involved in research programs at such places as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the
case studies. We have recently introduced a senior technical elective whichintroduces graphics processing from the perspective of the software developer, hardwarearchitect, and system integrator. Towards this end, lecture topics are designed for students with nocomputer graphics background, and focus on solving specific computing problems using skillslearned from a variety of computer engineering courses (e.g. digital logic, computer architecture,software design, embedded systems). As part of the laboratory component, students are presentedwith a series of bi-weekly design challenges that are geared towards implementing a particularmodule in the 3D graphics pipeline (with both hardware and software support) using anFPGA-based hardware
questions and assistance forinstructors.Keywords: Distributed lab, active learning, finite state machineIntroduction:Laboratory experiments are an essential source for instructors who want to include activelearning instructional methods in their engineering courses, yet the format is often not well suitedto incorporate into lecture-based courses. Lab experiments are generally performed in labcourses in centralized locations. A new extension to the laboratory experience is distributedlaboratories, which consist of experiments that can be conducted in a variety of locations such asa standard classroom, common area, or even a dorm room. As such, they can be incorporatedinto traditional lecture courses or distributed from decentralized locations.The
AC 2012-3601: GETTING ABET ACCREDITATION RIGHT THE FIRSTTIMEDr. Larry Wear, University of Washington, Tacoma As professor and Associate Director of the Institute of Technology at the University of Washington, Tacoma, Larry Wear teaches in such areas as software process improvement, software engineering, C/C++ programming, assembly language programming, logic and digital design, and introductory engineering courses. Many of these classes are laboratory intensive and some have been taught via distance learning. Wear received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, and both his M.S. in applied mathematics and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Santa Clara
AC 2012-4523: MOBILE STUDIO PEDAGOGY, PART 1: OVERCOMINGTHE BARRIERS THAT IMPEDE ADOPTIONProf. Kenneth A. Connor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Kenneth Connor is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, where he teaches courses on plasma physics, electromagnetics, electronics and instrumentation, electric power, and general engineering. His research involves plasma physics, electromagnetics, photonics, en- gineering education, diversity in the engineering workforce, and technology enhanced learning. Since joining the Rensselaer faculty in 1974, he has been continuously involved in research programs at such places as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Universities of Texas
suggest that studentsshould gain a solid hands-on experience on all measurement devices, hardware and softwarepresented in Table 2. Only Java received a low scoring compared to other topics. Therefore, it iscritical that the curriculum to be designed to add laboratory components to help students gainhands-on experience with the hardware and software listed in Table 2. As part of this proposalwe plan to develop a proper curriculum for these topics and cover them within at most a threecourse communication curriculum as detailed in Section 2.The results of Figures 1 and 2 confirm that the current practice of teaching Communicationcourses such as Wireless Communications, Communication Theory, and Digital Communicationsare not fully consistent with
student intake, numbers of graduatesand industry involvement are an order of magnitude greater than VUW‟s.One mechanism to begin this association of VUW with engineering has been to create, incollaboration with our WelTec partners, a series of eight promotional posters to be insertedinside secondary school science and technology laboratories, mathematics class rooms andcareers advisors‟ offices. These posters need to be informative and professional in appearanceso that teachers will want to host them, but they must also strongly identify VUW with an areaof “digital” engineering. We are not concerned that WelTec will also feature on these posterssince (as discussed) VUW attracts a different student cohort.In the absence of dedicated engineering
or DSP environment, and the recordings for these projects are available forfree from the author.BackgroundThe FFT and filter design are two fundamental techniques in DSP. Showing the students someexamples of how these techniques can be used in practice can help motivate them to learn themathematical theory. Some DSP courses incorporate laboratory experiments1,2,3, some useMATLAB/Simulink projects4,5,6, and some use web-based environments7. The projectsdescribed below are used in the author’s undergraduate DSP lecture course, which has a coursein signals and systems as the prerequisite. Some of the projects are assigned as part of ahomework assignment and some of them are standalone projects. The goal of the projects is toincrease the
learn. It can be very helpful to motivate the studentsby showing how the material is used in real systems. Simulations are an effective and easilydeployed method, but they do not have as direct connection to the real world as real systems.However most real communication systems are very complex, and it is often difficult to utilizethem in a class. Some laboratory experiments have been based on the USRP because they can beused to build communication systems that run in real-time without the need for building lowlevel hardware and software1,2.The USRP is an open source hardware platform provided by Ettus Research3. It converts radiofrequency (RF) signals to digital signals that can be processed by a computer, and also convertsdigital signals from
, and itsuse has been incorporated in several textbooks such as Wentworth2. MATLAB is used in varietyof engineering classes and students have good familiarity with this important software package.In most schools MATLAB is widely available in engineering laboratories with access availableto all faculty and students, mainly for classroom use. Many electrical/computer engineeringleading industries use MATLAB and its toolboxes.The first investigation in this paper demonstrates under what conditions a length of connectingwire must be treated as transmission line. Essentially, if the operating frequency is high enoughthat the wire length is a significant portion of a wavelength, then a transmission line model mustbe used. Here, a MATLAB demonstration
brief history of how undergraduate research in FPGA design was initiated.The FPGA Design class introduces the student to the concepts of reconfigurable logic design,including how to write VHDL code to synthesize basic digital logic designs, such as countersand adders, as well as how to use the tools for simulation and debug. Our laboratory is equippedwith FPGA development boards from Xilinx. The students learn how to use the associateddesign software from Xilinx, which includes the ChipScope virtual logic analyzer, thePlanAhead tool, and the ISIM simulator4. Some unique features of this course include adiscussion of the relevant VLSI design issues, testing FPGAs using high speed logic analyzers,and design with soft processor cores. An
same time, but more meetings arerequired. The most successful teams seem to be the ones whose meetings are the mostproductive. The team that did the kitting cell video claimed never to have all night sessions;rather, they had an open meeting time every day from 5-11pm in our computer laboratory. Teammembers came and went as they could and did other homework when their presence was notrequired. Team meetings came together dynamically and on demand. We currently have pre-reserved five rooms for 3 hours each evening Monday through Thursday. In addition, thefacilities manager now keeps the computer laboratory open round the clock all weekend duringthe weeks of the team project.One of the challenges that we face with our course redesign approach is
, received a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science. While in industry, he worked in small and large companies doing product development and industrial research. His responsibilities included both hardware and software development at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Siemens Corporate Research, and AVL, including microcode for a graphics processor, real-time medical image processing, and data acquisition and communications protocols for semiconductor process control. Since 1997, he has been a faculty member in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Department of Software En- gineering, now in the position of Chair. His professional interests are in the engineering of software for real-time and embedded systems. He was a recipient of