Basic Information

  • Course Code: EE 344
  • Course Name: Electronic Design Lab
  • Course Offered In: 2023-2024
  • Semester Season: Spring
  • Instructors: Prof. Siddharth Tallur
  • Prerequisites: Core lab courses. Basic knowledge about PCB design, CAD design and skills such as soldering are helpful, but sessions are held to teach these.
  • Difficulty (1 being easy and 5 being tough): 4

Course Content

Projects in this lab course span various areas within the electrical engineering domain such as electronic systems, computational processing, IOT, power systems, control systems with the objective of delivering a working prototype by the semester end. Students this year worked in teams of 4, instead of 3 due to the class size. By the end of the project, substantial exposure to electronic design practices, understanding datasheets, circuit design, testing and prototyping methods is achieved.

Feedback on Lectures

Lectures were conducted up until the midsem, with case studies being done in the latter half. These were in the Wednesday afternoon slot (~1.5hrs), not in the lab slots. Lectures included sessions on basic PCB and CAD design (working with KiCAD, Fusion360), good PCB design practices, reading and understanding datasheets, analog circuit design, getting started with microcontrollers (STM32, RPi Pico). Case studies involved session with previous EDL team members with successful projects, offering valuable practical insights into how they achieved their goals.

Feedback on Evaluations

Quiz - 5% Midsem - 20% 3 Milestones - 35% Final Milestone and Demo - 40% Each milestone required a presentation detailing the progress made and outlining future work. These presentations were reviewed by different professors for various projects, with additional reviews conducted by RAs at each milestone. The final milestone required a video demonstration of the working prototype, along with a live presentation of all projects in the lab.

Study Material and Resources

None specifically. Resources are mainly found from respective professors on any past work done on the topic, and papers online. TAs/RAs are also a huge help with finding material.

Follow-up Courses

May pursue further projects under the professor

Final Takeaway

The course provides excellent exposure to applying skills learnt in previous courses for engineering design. The professor acknowledged hard work done by teams, even if it was not 100% successful. The time commitment is substantial, especially in the last leg. Most students were in WEL lab for entire days and nights. All the WEL staff, TAs, RAs are extremely helpful, and stayed back in the lab to assist with the projects. All-in-all it was a very positive experience, and a lot of soft skills through team collaboration were also learnt along with engineering skills.