3 ECTS credits
75 h study time
Offer 1 with catalog number 1010886BNR for all students in the 2nd semester
at
a (B) Bachelor - advanced level.
- Semester
- 2nd semester
- Enrollment based on exam contract
- Impossible
- Grading method
- Grading (scale from 0 to 20)
- Can retake in second session
- Yes
- Taught in
- Dutch
- Faculty
- Faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen
- Department
and involved faculties/organizations
- Electricity
Electronics and Informatics
Applied Physics and Photonics
- Educational team
- Gerd Vandersteen
(course titular)
Heidi Ottevaere
Jef Vandemeulebroucke
- Activities and contact hours
- 48 contact hours Seminar, Exercises or Practicals
- Course Content
This work college has multiple aims. First, it is the goal to bridge the highly theoretical courses and the practical applications in order to stimulate the future engineers. Second, it is the aim that the students get in touch with electronics, photonics and information theory (EIT), and in addition has some knowledge about control theory. This will enable the students to make an educated choice about what they want to study later on. A last goal is to inform the non-EIT students about some fundamental aspects on EIT and control theory.
The aim of the work college is to control the height of a floating ping-pong ball. This ping-pong ball is positioned within a plexiglas tube and a ventilator blowing in this tube.
In a first phase, the wanted position of the ping pong ball is chosen to be fixed, while the position of the ball is measured and a signal is fed back to the ventilator to control the height. This requires the design of both some (small) analogue electronic circuitry, as well as the programming of a microcontroller in C. Additionally, the students need to mount a professional printed circuit board (PCB) using SMD technology.
In a second phase, it is required to be able to vary the position of the ping pong ball depending on some externally defined trajectory. This trajectory can be obtained in various ways: starting from video recondition techniques to detect the position of a hand, using a laser-based scanning technique, using the level of an audio sound, and yes, even controlling the height over the internet using the microcontroller (e.g. using an Adruino) is one of the possibilities. The actual method highly depends on the interest of the student. Creativity is hence strongly stimulated. However, the students should make sure that the different master educations in ICT are considered (electronics and information technology, computer science, photonics and biomedical engineering).
The students work in groups of 4 to 5 persons and each group has access to a setup containing:
- A ping pong tower comprising a tube, a ventilator, a ping pong ball and a tripot,
- A power steering module to provide the necessary power to the ventilator,
- Various types of sensors to determine the position of the ping pong ball in the tube,
- A microcontroller board to process the sensor measurement through USB and which is used as digital controller to be programmed in C,
- Electronic components, experiment board and commercial PCB to realize analog electronic circuitry,
- PCs (both hard- and software) to readout the measurement, process them (using a control algorithm) and to control the height of the ball. A high-level programming language (e.g. Java, Python, …) is used for that purpose.
- Course material
- Practical course material (Required) : Een map met technische documentatie over de verschillende onderdelen, schemas, data sheet en handleidingen zijn voorhanden
Practical course material (Required) : Een minimale applicatie die de communicatie met de microcontroller mogelijk maakt
- Additional info
On the educational platform Canvas, documentation about all the parts composing the system, datasheets, manuals, and demo code are made available.
- Learning Outcomes
-
General competencies
This technology project aims to give the students a flavor of a number of essential skills of an engineer. The focus is put more in particular on those skills that are essentially developed in the EIT curriculum.
- An intuitive approach to the system concept. This is one of the key concepts in the everyday abstract thinking of an engineer.
- Learn to use the system concept for the design and the debugging of a technical machine. You will have to learn to use the typical “what-if” techniques that are commonly used in this context.
- Learn to critically assess the advantages and the disadvantages of your own design. Learn to exploit the strengths of the design and to remediate its flaws.
- Learn to report in a technically fair way about the specifications of the design, and to clearly transfer the knowledge about the design to the colleagues working in the team.
- Learn to distribute the workload over the team members as a group, to allow evolving towards a solution in consensus.
- Learn about new topics and techniques independently. Of course, these topics will be founded on the prior basic skills of the curriculum.
The practical skills that you obtain in this course are
- The discovery of the many aspects of analogue and digital electronics, control engineering, signal processing and (micro) photonics.
- To learn to use and keep a log book to ease the reporting of the project results, and their transfer to others.
- To learn to discover the borders between software and hardware in electronic engineering applications
- Grading
-
The final grade is composed based on the following categories:
PRAC Teamwork determines 50% of the final mark.
PRAC Lab Work determines 50% of the final mark.
Within the PRAC Teamwork category, the following assignments need to be completed:
- rapport en presentatie
with a relative weight of 1
which comprises 50% of the final mark.
Note: Zie onder 'Aanvullende info m.b.t. evaluatie'.
Within the PRAC Lab Work category, the following assignments need to be completed:
- evaluatie individueel werk
with a relative weight of 1
which comprises 50% of the final mark.
Note: Zie onder 'Aanvullende info m.b.t. evaluatie'.
- Additional info regarding evaluation
The individual evaluation is based on
- The individual knowledge of the student, by asking questions about the parts that he/she realised.
- The explanation of the choices and the understanding of the main ideas and concepts of each part. The use of the lab notes is certainly allowed for these first two points.
- Critical evaluation of the team work and the individual contribution of the team members.
- The oral presentation of each student.
The evaluation of the group is based on
- The creativity of the solution that is proposed. It is not because something does not function properly that it is not good or not creative. We encourage students to take risks in your scientific choices!
- The understanding of the techniques used. Make sure that you understand what you are doing. During the labs you are welcome to ask us for the necessary explanations.
- The care put in the technical realisations. Working meticulously has a higher change to give qualitatively good results.
- The documentation (e.g. lab book) of your realisations. This includes the schematics, results, calculations, the reasoning behind the design choices. This will be useful to prepare the oral defense.
- The use of ICT in all its aspect, not specialized in one sub-domain. Specifically, the use of Electronics, Biomedical engineering techniques, Computer Science and Photonics will be graded. Besides the evaluation of the project as a whole, each sub-domain will be evaluated individually.
- The structure and the coherence of the oral presentation and demo of the results achieved. All the members of the team highlight their contribution and how this fits in the project.
- Allowed unsatisfactory mark
- The supplementary Teaching and Examination Regulations of your faculty stipulate whether an allowed unsatisfactory mark for this programme unit is permitted.
Academic context
This offer is part of the following study plans:
Bachelor of Engineering: Mechanical and Electrotechnical Engineering (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: Civil Engineering (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: Chemistry and Materials (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: Electronics and Information Technology (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: Electronics and Information Technology Profile Profile Computer Science (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: verkort traject elektronica en informatietechnologie na vooropleiding industriële wetenschappen (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: Startplan (only offered in Dutch)
Bachelor of Engineering: Biomedical Engineering (only offered in Dutch)