ECE 3400 Contents

Course Description
Syllabus
Projects and Labs

Note: Lecture Notes and Handouts and Homework and Exams are not available for this course.

Syllabus

• Leadership: Leadership and teamwork are integral parts of the engineering practice. Teams of 7-9 students are formed by the instructor in partnership with Cornell’s Engineering Leadership programs. Students in a team take on rotating leadership roles while ensuring the satisfactory completion of 6 projects throughout the semester. 
• Laboratory Exercises: Four Labs, with a goal of incrementally developing skills and circuitry towards the realization of the final project (robot), take place in the first half of the semester.
• Laboratory Notebooks: The students are taught to keep detailed lab notebooks (points are awarded for this).
• Final Robot Project: Each team is expected to have a functioning maze mapping robot that competes with the robots of other teams at the end of the semester. This autonomous vehicle is set loose in a maze with the task of finding paths and walls, identifying a source beacon, and communicating that information to a base station that graphically displays the progress.
• Ethics: Ethical considerations are discussed in class in at least 4 parts. The first two parts, taught by the instructor, cover basic engineering ethics considerations and classical/ historical cases are presented and discussed. The last 2 parts are presented by a guest lecture from Cornell’s Bovay Program for Ethics and modern cases are discussed in these later parts.
• Guest Lectures: A series of guest lectures by the Cornell faculty and external professionals are given in the second half of the course. These lectures are intended to expose students to the cutting edge research.