The instructor presents all available projects to the class for their consideration Groups of two to four students agree among themselves to work on a particular project. Students submit a proposal to the sponsor to complete the work. Sponsor agrees to support the proposal and supplies necessary resources. Project work begins Students submit regular progress reports to sponsor. Sponsor participates in design reviews, reviews tests results and verifies compliance tests.
Students present their completed work at the Design Expo at the end of the spring semester.
An instrumentation package is needed to provide soil and crop data for closed loop control of a spatially variable center pivot irrigation system. RF linked to a remote receiver for data communications. An alternate IR communications link for communications with a palm-top or laptop computer is optional. The system must be able to store 12 weeks of environmental data including a time stamp that is Y2K compliant. All data is sampled and stored at a rate of two samples per hour.