It’s just a prototype not a product!

Student projects don’t have to create sophisticated gizmos. They don’t have invent a time machine like the one in this video.

Your project is a success if it just does what it promises to do. And being a student project, your project obviously has limitations and flaws. It’s not perfect. The world understands that. It’s alright if your landmine detection robot doesn’t climb a hill. It’s enough if your skifi metal robot detects an iron piece. We will call that little iron piece a landmine for now. It’s alright if your GPS device does not work with a real satellite. It’s enough if it proves a point.

The most important thing that you have to do after having decided a project idea is to define the scope of your project. Here is what I mean by scope of a project. In a broad sense, scope of your project means what your project is all about, and what your project is not about. You are defining these things clearly at the start of your project. So defining scope is what you should do before starting your project.

Here is how to define scope of your project. Create a new word document. Copy paste, the following questions in your document.  Answer each of those questions in a para or two. This is going to be the document that defines the scope of your project.

Scope of Engineering Project

• What is your Project all about?
  • What is the main objective of your project?
  • What are the desired features of your project?
  • What NOT is your project ?
• What are the requirements of your project
  • In software?
  • In hardware?
• What are the dependencies of your project?
  • Is any third party software going to be used?
  • Is any third party hardware going to be used?
  • Is any patented technology going to be used?
• In which Work Environments does your project run?

The reason why you should define the scope is to make your project objectives clear. From my experience, I can tell you that, if you don’t clearly draw boundaries of your project, you will tend to waste too much of time in doing unnecessary things. Once you and your team define a scope, you will have better clarity of what to do next in your project.

Here is an audio discussion with Sreeram on more details about defining scope of an engineering project.