Conception

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Concepts

You've now heard about the semester project with Miami-Dade in Lecture 2, aka Valerie. While we form teams, is time to start thinking about concepts.

This exercise should be done individually.

What's a concept?

We have several interconnected aspects of design that we are trying to untangle:

We are trying to develop specifications for our system, which will enable us to engage in detailed engineering design. However, there is not a single-valued mapping from the requirements to their specifications. Further, it's possible that some requirements are not feasible. Finally, while the specifications will influence the system archictecture, the architecture can also influence the specifications.

To untangle the process and get started, we will develop concepts. A concept is an idea for a system that could potentially meet the requirements. The concept includes:

What does the system look like? What does the HW node look like, physically? What might the web front-end look like?
How does the system meet the requirements? Meaning, what might its underlying architecture look like, in terms of HW, FW, and SW?
In developing this concept, what questions arise that need to be answered by your team, the staff or our Miami-Dade partners?

As a refresher on Valerie, you can reference the project page and Carlos's presentation from Lecture 2.

Remember that at a high level, we're trying to design a system to measure bus stop heat experience, and occupancy to determine how long individuals are waiting at the stop.

In this exercise, you will generate two concepts. A concept can be sketched by hand, or drawn on a computer, or a mixture.

Your concept doesn't need to be fully fleshed out, but the more you think it through, the more valuable it will be for you and your team. We'll be grading on thoroughness. A sketch that took 5 min, with no thought given to the underlying architecture, will obtain a low grade. A series of sketches or drawings that show clear thought and attention will obtain a high grade.

The most complete concepts will include:

Industrial design for the HW node -- what does it look?
A wireframe of the web front-end
The rough functional block diagram of the HW, FW, and SW [FW & SW may be hard at this stage, so don't feel obligated]
A set of questions that need answering, either from the team, the staff, or the partner. These are the known unknowns.

Upload to Google Drive

Deposit your concepts in your team's Google Drive folder, in a suitably marked sub-folder ("Individual concepts" or something similar), and make sure the filename makes sense ("Joels-concept1", Joels-concept2", or similar).

What's next?

We'll be going over the concepts as a team in Lab02.