Looking for ideas: cheap but awesome project ideas

Hi everyone,

I’m currently in my final year at university and I’m required to design and build a project for my final-year submission. I’m really excited about this because I want to create something meaningful and technically solid.

The challenge I’m facing is budget I can’t afford expensive components or complex lab equipment. Because of that, I’m looking for ideas on how to build something that is low-cost but still innovative and impressive from an engineering point of view.

Jan Cumps 9 days ago

Did they give you any criteria?
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beacon_dave 9 days ago

Perhaps take a look here for inspiration ?

Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) Student Projects
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micheal.embedded 9 days ago in reply to Jan Cumps

nope just go nuts im a computer engineering students so something about embedded systems or Ai related
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Jan Cumps 9 days ago in reply to micheal.embedded

That's a hint. The weight seems to be on the software side. Not the hardware/electronics.
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micheal.embedded 9 days ago in reply to beacon_dave

thanks man
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beacon_dave 9 days ago in reply to micheal.embedded

There are hundreds more students projects based on earlier PIC32 and AVR microcontrollers, for further inspiration.
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robogary 8 days ago

Interesting. When my son did his senior year computer engineering project, the students could work in teams, his team had 3 or 4 students. HW , pcb, sw.

Impressing a prof is tough. Take a look thru E14 projects for inspiration. PyimageSource has cool examples.

Can you use your pc and built in web camera ?
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vmate 8 days ago

What counts as low-cost? How complex are we talking? Is the focus mostly on software, or both hardware and software?

I've been looking at the NUCLEO-N657X0-Q, it has an insanely fast core and a NN accelerator. You mentioned embedded systems and AI related, so maybe combine the two?
Make and train some relatively small model for a task. Think object detection, voice recognition, or even something like playing chess.

If I'd have to pick something now, I'd probably get some camera module for it, and train a network to recognize chess pieces on a board, and another one to play chess(although pure NNs are not the optimal way to do it, look into how Stockfish works if you're interested). See if the NN accelerator is powerful enough to run some existing pretrained voice synthesis model. Recognize chess pieces, figure out the best move, say the move out loud. A little portable chess machine that works with regular chess boards.
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dougw 8 days ago

The best cost to power ratio is probably ESP32.

If you add a low cost camera, you can perform ML image recognition projects like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZIKVaD3dRk
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BigG 8 days ago in reply to micheal.embedded

You have to draw upon some theory you were taught to demonstrate that you know how to apply it. That's typically how you're graded. So what aspect are you wanting to look at in terms of theory (hint usually target something liked / you're interested in, or failing that focus on something you're good at). Then build from there.
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