Seeking Advice on Small EE Project Ideas

[Neutronium]

Hello,

I haven’t frequented this board in long while but right now I need some advice.

I’m currently a third year electrical engineering student (on an irregular course sequence) and quite frankly, I’m becoming disillusioned about the field I’ve chosen. It’s not that electronics or power engineering doesn’t interest me, but so far I feel like I cannot apply anything that I’ve learned into something productive.

What primarily led to this is that I’ve failed to find an internship in my specific field due to a lack of technical skills, and I suspect most EE students at my level who do succeed end up doing something software or basic technician tasks. Also, I notice that many of the software and computer engineering students have their own software projects, but practically no one in electrical engineering does. I may be wrong, but this is my perception of the situation so far.

There is a project course in the fall semester that might change things for the better; however I feel that doing a small electrical engineering project by myself or with classmates this summer would help me more. The problem though is that I’m not exactly sure what I want to do or if it can be done with the skills and resources I have. I am interested in hardware neural networks and applications of electroactive polymers, but I think neural networks might be out of the question for a small project and the electroactive polymers are probably out of my budget. I may have total access to my university’s IEEE student office for tools.

Are there any recommended projects?

 

[story645]

Are there any recommended projects?

Prototype your neural nets in VHDL and find the FPGA lab so that you can test it out on real hardware? Play with some software neural nets?

If you have a strong cognitive psychology program, hop on over to them and see if they wouldn't want an EE on board for a project or two. There's a lot of interesting signal processing work involving cognitive process. (Oh, and real neural nets.)

Otherwise, I like the arduinos for random small projects to do some practical EE work on the side. They're powerful, but cheap and easy to use micro-controllers.

 

[Okefenokee]

Hello,
but so far I feel like I cannot apply anything that I’ve learned into something productive.

I know that feeling.

I found that microprocessors are the gateway to doing interesting little projects. They have outputs that you can use to control things and ADC's that you can use to measure things. Once you get the hang of it, programming them becomes easy. I used microprocessors to make a TV remote with a learning eye (it could copy codes from other remotes) and I made a digital voltmeter that stored data and sent it to my PC through a USB cable.

Take a look at http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php" gear. They have full evaluation boards for lots of different chips. Maybe something there will inspire you to make a cool app. Good luck.