Hardware Prototyping Capability for a Community Service Projects Course in Electrical and Computer Engineering

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In the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program, Electrical and Computer Engineering students earn academic credit for long-term team projects that solve technology-based problems for local community service agencies. Each project team is a mix of sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and each student may participate in an EPICS project for up to 3 years. This structure provides the continuity required to carry out long-term engineering design projects that can have a significant impact on the community. The program is establishing a hardware prototyping facility. Its goal is to enable the student teams to fully implement and test their designs. The students thus experience all phases of an engineering project, from project-definition meetings with their community service agency partner, through system design, to construction and evaluation of a system prototype. After a prototype has proven its value to the community, funds raised from private sources are used to produce the systems deployed on a permanent basis. The five current EPICS projects and those to be added involve many technologies: computer networks, digital electronics, distributed databases, electromechanical systems, energy management systems, human-computer interfaces, power electronics, solar power, speech processing, and wireless communications. The equipment supports hardware prototyping efforts involving any combination of these technologies. The addition of this full-scale hardware prototyping capability is crucial to the continued development of the EPICS program. It enables the EPICS program to become an outstanding model of how community awareness, communication skills, teamwork, system design skills, and project management skills can be taught to undergraduates in engineering.