Arduino-based Sensor Device – An Engineering Physics Second-year Design Project within the Engineering Design and Practice Sequence (EDPS) of the Queen’s Engineering Professional Spine
Authors: Knobel Robert , Chen Mark , Clapham Lynann 
Published: January 2020

In 2011, Queen’s Engineering began rollout of its "Engineering Design and Practice Sequence (EDPS)". The EDPS is a "professional spine" sequence of courses over four years, meant to address and incorporate into all of its engineering programs the majority of the 12 Graduate attributes required by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB). In year 1, the first EDPS course – Engineering Practice I - introduces students to engineering design and problem solving, but with little formal instruction in the design process and engineering tools. Formal instruction in these aspects comes in second year, in Engineering Design and Practice II (course number APSC200). Finally, in third and fourth year, students undertake significant design projects in their discipline.

The second-year version of the professional spine, APSC200, is a one-term course taken by all students. This begins with a 6-week Faculty-wide course module, followed by a 6-week program-specific module. In the first Faculty-wide segment, students learn the design process – problem definition and scope, idea generation and broadening tools, decision-making tools, economic analysis, stakeholders, risk, and safety. Students are exposed to the necessity of formal design techniques via a zero-level "P0" project, and taught these techniques during a more extensive P1 project.

The second 6 weeks of APSC200 involves a discipline-specific project (P2) in which the student teams practice the skills introduced in the earlier portion of the course while working through a design project chosen to emphasize the skills of their program. This paper focusses on the development and implementation of the P2 project for students in the Queen’s Engineering Physics program. The goal of this project is to introduce discipline-specific tools and techniques, to excite students in their chosen engineering discipline, and to put into practice the formal design techniques introduced earlier.

The P2 project developed for Engineering Physics was entitled a "Compact Environmental Monitoring Station". The premise was that the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) issued an RFP for small, cheap sensor devices that could be provided to every Ontario household, and set up to "crowdsource" environmental data for the MOE. Student teams were required to research and justify which environmental parameters would be appropriate for their monitoring device, decide on parameters to monitor, design the device, and build a working prototype of the device.

The device specifications required the use of an Arduino-based platform, interfacing the chosen sensor(s) to a laptop computer using MatLab. Since only some students were familiar with Arduinos and MatLab, two "just in time" workshops were delivered on these topics, using a "flipped lab" approach.

For the prototype design and build, students had only 4 weeks and a budget of $100. Arduino boards and some basic sensors were supplied, with students able to source and purchase other components within their budget. The prototype-build provided the students with a valuable hands-on experience and also helped them to fully appreciate unexpected practical design constraints. Given the short timeframe (4-weeks) for the design and build, prototypes were very impressive, with many including solar power or rechargeable batteries, Bluetooth connectivity, 3-D printed packaging, IPhone or Android apps, as well as calibration functions.

This paper will summarize the development of this Engineering Physics P2 module, and will report on the first year of offering it in its current format.