These notes are to help you plan and document your project to allow
you to use your time most effectively.  Please use them as a
guidelines that have helped me in my engineering career.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or for
further discussion.


1. PLANNING PHASE: THE DELIVERABLES AND TASKS

Figuring out what is required to motivate, plan, and complete a project
is an important skill you are learning this semester (as opposed to the
normal classroom assignments).

One approach that has helped me is to dream; and then work backwards
from your desired outcome.  Define the final project and a cool
demonstration.  Then draw a diagram of the system you will build.
Then begin detailing what is in every hardware (and software) block.
This normally helps in gaining a better concept of the tasks, effort,
risk, etc.

Many of the planning tasks are best represented when most of the
detail is hidden but the salient, measurable outcomes.  Such data is
may not be well represented textually.  Employ diagrams and (Gant)
charts, using lists and text where appropriate.  Diagrams can be hand
drawn.  Tasks probably should just be bulleted or hierarchical lists
with the relevant information.  Perhaps a spreadsheet would work that
contains information on the task, amount of effort, risk level,
etc. but hand written notes are sufficient.  (But handwritten, you
need to soon transfer them to an electronic format.)

You should have for class early in the project:

A diagram of your finished project, COMPLETED PROJECT DELIVERABLES and
stretch goals, interfaces specifications and tasks, project tasks with
schedule and milestones, task risk assessment, testing and integration
strategy, bill of materials with vendor list and cost, references used
so far (including mentors), [group] communication plan




2. DOCUMENTATION

Everyone should structure their documents as technical papers.
The format for a technical paper is:

Title (project name, contributors name and e-mail, and your project
      web URL)

Abstract (1/8 to 1/4 of a page - simple complete description)

Intro (1-2 pages - motivation, application, related work of others,
       your approach and why)

Body
  Tasks,
  Interfaces,
  novel aspects (risk assessment),
  test and integration,
  (bill of materials and vendor list),
  (group management),
  [...]
  results

Conclusion

Bibliography


This document should be incrementally built through the two semesters.
The title, intro, and part of the introduction come from the
assignments in the first weeks.  The initial structure of what you
would put in the body middle of the semester, but it probably won't be
in a full article format yet with results and conclusions.