CoE held its 2009 Senior Design Competition June 3, 2009 in the Mitchell Auditorium. All graduating CoE students are required to complete a Senior Design project, teaching students the engineering design process from conception to production. Eight teams competed for first place but Dr. Steven Weber’s team took the grand prize with their ‘schdulr’ system.

1ST PLACE TEAM
Project Representing Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Comprehensive Web-Based Course Management and Scheduling System
The ECE team designed an application called ‘schdulr’, which is a web-based course scheduling application that provides students with a unified interface to plan out their course of study at college and register for classes.

The team consisted of Abhishek Bhardwaj, Anisha Shrestha and George Benny Varghese.

Team’s reflection on resources that they found useful:

“Our senior design project is an application called “schdulr”. It is a web based course management and scheduling system. We used the Ruby and Ruby on Rails framework to build our application. We used the physical library resources extensively as a programming reference for Ruby and to learn about optimization theory. The online resources such as Books24X7 and Safari offered us the convenience to access the information from anywhere. This allowed us to significantly reduce the development time and helped us create an award winning project.”

Congratulations Team!

Andrew Cebulski and his team members last year worked on their freshman design project titled ‘Diet Management’. See below for the Abstract and a link to their Full design report.

Abstract:

The cell phone dietary monitoring system is intended to easily record the user’s food intake, and also provide information that is important to their diet plan. The device is designed to utilize a Bluetooth headset, which will be able to listen for the user to begin chewing. The headset will also be able to take in the name and portion size of a food. Finally, the device is able to output important nutritional information about the user’s diet, such as calories and vitamins. The device prompts the user to input their meal information after every major meal, based on when they finish chewing. The information is stored in the user’s cell phone. After the food information has been recorded, the information is sent to an online database, which is able to obtain average nutritional values for each type of food. The values are sent back to the user’s phone, where they are kept track of. The user has the ability to have specified totals read to them through the Bluetooth headset after every meal. The device allows the user to accurately keep track of the foods they eat, as well as give them an idea of how they can better follow their chosen diet plan. The technology does not detect drinks, and it may not always work correctly in loud environments. The technology operates under the assumption that the user records the foods and the serving sizes correctly. Two areas for future work on the project are the hardware needed to analyze the chewing, and the other area is the power consumption of the total device.

Final Design Report: Diet Management Final Design Report

Source: The Drexel Smart House Wiki

Among the sources that the team used included:

C. A. Vereecken, M. Covents, C. Matthys and L. Maes, “Young adolescents’ nutrition assessment on computer (YANA-C),” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 59, pp. 658, May. 2005.

N. De Belie, M. Sivertsvik and J. De Baerdemaeker, “Differences in chewing sounds of dry-crisp snacks by multivariate data analysis,” in First International ISMA Workshop on Noise and Vibration in Agricultural and Biological Engineering, 2003, pp. 625-43.

J. L. Weinstein, V. Phillips, E. MacLeod, M. Arsenault and A. M. Ferris, “A Universal Product Code Scanner Is a Feasible Method of Measuring Household Food Inventory and Food Use Patterns in Low-Income Families,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association, vol. 106, pp. 443-445, 3. 2006.

C. Wardell, “What’s On Now The kitchen of the future is not so very far away. Get a piece of it with these innovative new products.;” Popular Science, vol. 264, pp. 40, March. 2004.

Bowers, John H. amd Thomas J. Clare, “Inventory System using Articles with RFID tags,” U.S. 5963134, October 5, 1999. [Online].

P. Harrop. Smart labels. AccessScience@McGraw-Hill (Online Science and Technology Encyclopedia available from the library’s web site)
(Note: See What is AccessScience? How do I access it?

R. Hall and J. S. Hampl, “Radio frequency identification: Applications for dietetics professionals,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association, vol. 104, pp. 1521-1522, 10. 2004.

An excellent compilation of references using scholarly journal articles, patents and electronic reference works.

Adil Mudassir, a graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, recounts his literature search experience for a class assignment for a course during the Spring term.

In his own words:

“I attended a library information seminar in Fall 07 and through it, got to know about the plethora of information and resources made available at the library. This was useful for me during the ECE-C633 course I took this Spring under Dr. Sethu. We were to do a literature survey and critique a technical paper in the field of networking. I was able to go to the IEEE Transactions as well as ACM Digital Library through the library and then decided on the following paper – Efficient Cache Management for Multi-hop Wireless Networks -  -  getting all this information in the library helped me a lot for my coursework.”

The senior design team of Eric Eisele, Courtney Reid, Dan Pugh, Sarah Byrnes, and Charlie Woods was awarded a Phase II People, Prosperity, and Planet Award from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  See Senior Design Team wins EPA funding for more details.

Eric and his team used several Library resources over a period of time.  These include:

• ASCE Civil Engineering Database
• ASCE Conference Proceedings Online
• BuildingGreen – (BuildingGreen Suite integrates online versions of GreenSpec, Environmental Building News, and a database of more than 160 high-performance building case studies.)
• DoE Energy Codes
• Ei Compendex and INSPEC
• Environmental Engineering Abstracts
• Google Scholar
• Home Depot Smart Home
• Knovel: Engineering and Scientific Online References
• MAD CAD – (NOTE: access to cross-referenced collections of building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire, and maintenance codes from BOCA, SBCCI, ICBO, ICC, and NFPA.)
• ScienceDirect
• Statistical Resources
• Statistical Resources on the Web-Energy
• Web of Knowledge

Eric also needed some ASTM standards for the Solar Coating project. Using How Do I access ASTM, SAE, ASHRAE, ISO or ANSI standards? Any other standards? Eric was able to obtain ASTM standards that he needed for the project. Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering and Materials Engineering Site include a few resources that may also help in future for other projects. See also Cool Roofs and Cool Roofing Materials Database available from Heat Island Group Resources.

Eric found using Knovel very useful since he was able to locate number of electronic handbooks that helped him find properties of materials through researching this database.

Eric also contributed in creating  Drexel’s web site for Sustainability and Drexel Green.

Congratulations to the Senior Design Team!