91.548 Botfest Project Report

due Thursday, April 10

For this assignment you are to produce a detailed report of what you presented at the March 29 Botfest project demonstration. The report is to be posted as a web document or site.

Introduce the project with a paragraph or two explaining how you came to choose it.

Then dive in to the core of the report: a narrative description of what your project does and how it operates. You should provide a block diagram level description of the principal project components and how they interact.

The report should include sufficient technical detail that a savvy reader could construct your project from the information given. That means that you should have complete schematics for all circuits and code listings for all software that is part of your design. (Please note: schematics need not be machine-drawn; a neat hand-drawn schematic that is scanned in is perfectly acceptable.)

Photographs of actual hardware would be welcome.

If your project was not fully functional, you should describe what aspects of the project did work, and describe what obstacles to further functionality you believe presently exist.

The report should include further planning activities for your project.

• If you consider the project as “done,” then this aspect could simply be a wish-list.
• If the project is not done (that is, you would like to pursue it further over the rest of the semester), then this piece should be a clear plan as to what needs to be done to make your project operate at some basic level of accomplishment.

Team projects should include a discussion of the particular contributions that each team member made to the project.

Finally, the report should include a decent discussion of what you didn’t do. In other words, I am specifically interested in ideas that were attempted and then abandoned, detours that didn’t pan out (but might have shaped the direction your project did take), and other problems. It is my belief that our work is shaped as much by our failures as our successes—perhaps more so; we learn more when things go wrong then when they just work. I want a significant piece of this report to be this historical dimension of the project. In other words, it’s not just where you ended up, it’s how you got there.

The report should be posted to your area of the class web site no later than Thursday, April 10.