Tips for using your time wisely


It is important to use your time as efficiently as possible. There will be extra sessions the Saturdays before the challenge and WYSE and IEEE usually hold extra session on evenings sometime within the next two weeks. These extra sessions will be posted when I learn the schedule. But that said IT IS BEST NOT TO RELY ON THESE EXTRA SESSIONS. There are over 300 students taking ECE110 this semester - assume that ALL of them will also want to attend the extra lab sessions. Max seating 35-40, 50 if you are willing to share cars.

  • Build as much as you can at home.
  • Build small easily testable blocks like the STOP circuit, the COLOR DETECTION circuit, the TRACK NAVIGATION circuit, or the SPLIT NAVIGATION circuit.
  • Test these individual subcircuits before hooking all the small blocks together to make sure they work when not connected to anything else.
  • Lay out your board neatly so that you know where each subcircuit is located. This makes it easier to debug.
  • Look at the distribution of points given during the design challenge - a good, working track navigating circuit with a split/color detection circuit that works poorly gets you way more points than a working split navigating circuit with a poor track navigating circuit. Even if you can only detect the split and detect the presence of colored tape, you get some points. Don't obsess about details unless you have time.

Example track



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Documenting your Design



OUTLINE of sections to include in the report.

  • INTRODUCTION/DESCRIPTION
    Include a brief description of the purpose of your circuit and design. This does not need to be very long. Someone not familiar with our lab should be able to pick up your final report and know what the end result of the project is.

    For example:
    Design a autonomous vehicle that will follow a black line drawn on a white piece of paper as long as the black line does not require the vehicle to execute a turn sharper than 90 degrees. The end of the track is marked by a black square. Other challenges include navigation of splits in the path turning right or left depending on the number of colored strips appearing on the path before the split, passing through the RING OF FIRE (ROF).

  • DESCRIPTION of DESIGN
    This is the heart of your documentation of your design, the most important part being your visual documentation. Simply drawing a schematic is rarely useful to someone else and is often, for debugging or continuing the design process at a later date, not useful to you. A heirarchical approach is always much easier to understand. Here is a simple (and enrirely ficticious) example of a design that is documented by dividing the whole design into logical pieces, documenting each piece, and documenting the communication between each piece.

    A multilevel Block Diagram is always easier to understand:

    • Top Level should show all major inputs and outputs to each block of circuitry - the blocks need not be anatomically correct (see vehicle block).

      Pasted Graphic 1

      Along with a description of the inputs and outputs -

      • VmL, and VmL - voltages supplied to the motors by the drive circuitry. A voltage of 2V or less - the motor is still. A voltage of 2V or more the motor is running.
      • L and R - the TTL signals that control the drive circuitry ...
      • S1, S2, and S3 - signals from the IR sensors

      And a description of the functionality of the blocks themselves -

      • Vehicle - a nasty piece of equipment built in some distant past that never runs the same any two times in a row, but has two motors, each having two wheels attached, that can be turned on and off by turning on and off the voltage applied across the terminals of each motor.
      • Drive Circuitry - circuitry that accepts as inputs the TTL signal L and R that are generated to turn on and off the motors under different conditions ... and outputs the correct voltage to either run the motor and thereby turning the wheels of each motor, and stopping the motor and there by preventing the wheels from turning.
      • Navigation Circuitry - TTL circuit that accepts as input the output of IR sensors ... This circuit is composed of several subcircuits dedicated to navigating the vehicle through different obstacles.
      • IR sensors - devices which transmits an InfraRed signal and receives the reflection of that signal used in this design to provide information about the relative position of the vehicle body to the designate path that it must follow.


    • Further documentation is needed to provide a complete description of the circuitry, so a logical next step is to provide block diagrams of the more complex blocks in the highest level description - the drive circuitry, the navigation circuitry, and the placement of the IR sensors. The next level of block diagram for the navigation circuitry might look like the figure below. Again for ease of understanding the navigation circuitry block is further divided in to subcircuits - the track navigating circuitry, the stop circuitry, the color detection and split navigation circuitry, and the ring of fire navigation circuitry.

      Pasted Graphic 2

      Each block diagram should be followed by a verbal description of the operation of each subcircuit.

    • At the next level, detailed schematics of the logic circuitry is needed along with pinouts, and either a flow diagram or a truth table should accompany the digital schematics. For example, the stop circuit might accept as input the output of 2 of the sensors which it uses to make a decision about stopping both motors in the following way, if the signal from both sensors is high then stop both motors and set the S signal high to indicate that a stop condition has been met (depending on the placement of the sensors this is usually a poor stopping strategy). You can either provide a truth table describing the outputs in terms of the inputs or ...
    • Finally a placement diagram is needed so that subsequent designers can recreate your design exactly as you did building the original.

  • DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
    Include a description of the your approach to following the track and negotiating the split. Did you choose the tape avoidance strategy, tape following? Why did you place the sensors where you did etc…
  • DESCRIPTION of HOW THE DESIGN PERFORMS
    Describe how your circuit performs – what works and what does not work as well as you would like it too.
  • SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS to DESIGN
    How could you improve your design if you had more time?


This should get you started. REMEMBER, the goal of the final report is documentation of your circuit so that someone else, or even yourself, can build it later.