Selecting a Final Year project....

Selecting your Final year project is the most crucial part of the entire engineering course. It not only reflects your learning and studies during the entire 4 years but also test your capabilities as a student in terms of innovation, pressure handling and proper management of time and resources.

Now there are many approaches on how you can select a particular project. What I am most familiar with and most of the industrial projects are currently designed is through a” Top-down” or “Bottom-up” approach.

What is a Top-down approach?

Top-down approach is basically thinking of an abstract level application of a particular idea and further improvising over the practical implementation of it.

And Bottom-up…?

Bottom-up is like having fundamental modules already worked on previously, and utilising these modules for a more sophisticated application.

So adoption of a particular approach is dependent on the group. Besides there are few more factors to be taken into consideration while selecting a BE project.

·         Choose a Unique and Improved Project

There are many institutes which offer live projects but most of them are offering the same projects from many years. These projects from many institutes are not unique and have already been submitted by many students to their universities. So, try to avoid such projects if possible. Try to make sure that your project work is unique and is an improvement over other projects if a similar project already exists.

·         Address Social concerns

Society today has many such issues which are always recognised over the sessions of various debates, but are seldom solved. You can look for such problems faced by every commoner and may provide a technically innovative approach to solve it to make things a little better.

·         Planning is better

Never start a project without planning properly about it. Gather all the information, research well and then go for your selected project. You cannot change the project once the sheet has been sent to University.

·         Domain bounded projects.

Many times it happens those students in electronics go for a GUI based or software project or the Computer students opt a hardware-based project. I do not discourage learning new things and implementing them in your project, but if you have proficiency over some programming language or field of knowledge it is better to utilise that than learn something new. Besides, at times of your project vivas, if the major part of project is not in you course related domain you might be in trouble answering to queries.

·         Placement success

Do remember that your projects can be your key to success in placements so pick them cautiously. An innovative project can make your mark on the interviewer’s mind so selecting uniquely useful project can give you a job too!

·         Physical parameters

There are various physical parameters that comes with the implement-ability of the project

 Less or No Involvement of Wireless Networks

 Wireless networks like RF modules; Blue-tooth , etc. can stop working any time. Imagine if it crashes or stops functioning on your project presentation day. Besides, you will encounter difficulty in dealing with interference and noise issues. I hence, recommend avoiding wireless networks as far as possible.

 Programming Language Used

 It should always be a platform with an independent language like Java, .PHP, etc. so that the        project can run on every platform.

 Available Core-gen and libraries

Making your own library and functional modules is always advisable. But if in case the application is too complex and deals with a small part of the project then readily available open source libraries can be utilised without much concerns. For e.g. Writing a RS232 driver in C is simple but writing a USB or Ethernet driver can be tedious so it can be implemented using CORE-gen.

·         Taking Others Help with Your Project Work

There are thousands of engineering colleges over and lakhs of engineering students over here. But the bitter truth is that there is an immense scarcity of good teachers to cater the needs of these students. Because of this, many local colleges hire unqualified and unskilled teachers. Many colleges do not even have their laboratories fully equipped. Even if there are laboratories, there are not many people to train the students practically. This is the main cause why students are forced to seek others help in their project work. According to my statistics (although with my limited data), not more than 30 percent of the students studying in these local engineering colleges do their project on their own. I do not know how it is in other places, but here in Mumbai (India), there are many companies and institutes with crores of rupees of turnover which they earn only by making these projects. This itself is sufficient to understand the gravity of the situation.

I guess most people reading this article are about to select their project as soon as possible. If that is the case, and if you fall in this category, then I recommend you to take help from others as you do not have a better alternative. Taking others help in learning something is not at all wrong but taking others help to skip learning is wrong. If you think you are not yet good at electronics or programming and if you cannot implement any circuits or programs on your own, then the first thing is to find a tutor who can teach you all these things. There are many resources online to help you learn and enhance your skill. However, it will be better if you can find a personal tutor who can help you out. Better if you get any good senior or a professor of yours to help you learn. If you are really interested in learning something and if you need any help, you can also contact me. Learn all the necessary skills first and then you can proceed with the project.

As a final word, if you want any assistance for your projects and if you are looking for any unique project ideas, you can also contact me. I can assist you in your work.