CS-358 - Making intelligent things

Description

The course is teaching students essential skills in designing and prototyping intelligent physical artifacts, including microcontroller (such as Arduino and Raspberry PI) programming, practical electronics, and computer-aided design and manufacturing, using modern prototyping methods such as 3D printing and CNC milling.

The course is leveraging and refine students' skillsets in computational thinking and in building advanced software artifacts, and aims to open new horizons for them by allowing them to explore new ways of connecting the learning outcomes of other IC courses with the physical world. A substantial emphasis is put on engineering low-level (microcontroller-based) systems software.

The course is structured into three phases - a first consisting of tutorials and crash courses on essential skill sets such as practical electronics and 3d printing; a second in which students individually build a precisely specified small intelligent thing under close guidance by the teaching staff; and a third - the main project phase - in which teams of students propose, design, and implement their own project.

Students have access to a workshops and digital fabrication technologies such as laser cutters, CNC milling machines, and 3D printers through the SPOT makerspace. We define a suitable format allowing all student teams to exchange insights and present progress throughout the semester; at the end of the semester, a public event is taking place to showcase the results of the projects.

End-of-project objective

Build a functional prototype of an intelligent object

Number of students

There are usually 40-50 students doing this project.

Website

Project coordinator

Responsible professor

Member list

Display current project members (EPFL login required)