Joshua WongProfessional Self-Assessment ReportCourse Objectives: According to the syllabus, there are twelve unique objectives that should be metby the end of the course. The first objective is technical communication. Technicalcommunications covers several areas including presentations, papers, and negotiatingwith suppliers. This objective was personally satisfied by explaining the project to ourpeers and by giving a technical lecture. Additionally, lots of technical communicationstook place during our teleconferences with Lenovo. We had chances to speak to withprofessional engineers and discuss the project. The second objective is technical writing. This objective has been demonstratedby primarily the application note, which is one of the most technical writings possible, itis also one of the only writings pieces that was done individually. Other team reports,such as the proposal and final report also represent other forms of technical writings.The third objective was to write a proposal and gain approval. In my opinion, thisobjective wasn’t technically met as we never had to get “approval” for the proposal.Basically, regardless of the job done on the proposal a team as still guaranteed a project.The proposal was reviewed and commented, but no proposals were rejected. Aside fromthe fact that rejection of the proposal was impossible, I feel that the proposal has beenadequately met. The fourth objective was to comprehend appropriate content and style for oralpresentations. Based on the feedback to the technical lecture and the proposalpresentation given in class, this objective has been met as a minimal amount of negativefeedback was received.The fifth objective was to access relevant standards and interpret their meaningand application. For my individual technical contribution there are not many standardsthat needed to be met. The biggest standard was free software. Since there are manydefinitions of open source software, I choose the broadest interpretation as possible, withfree software being any software with cost, rather then the open source definition of free.This made determining software really easy. Another standard that needed to be met wasRoHS. This standard governs the components useable inside a system. Although thiswasn’t a concern during this phase of the project, it will certainly become a concern asnew teams try to minimize the cost.The sixth objective was to delineate the principal design criteria and constraintsfor an electrical or computer engineering design project. This was done by extensivelysearching for possible architectures for the project and by completing a comprehensiveproposal. The seventh objective was to describe and understand the overall engineeringdesign process. This was primarily done via the lectures in class, in particular the designfor six sigma lectures and the Gantt chart lectures. A lot of this was applied early in thereyear when our team decided on the basic architecture of the system. The eighth objective was to describe and understand contemporary industrypractices and trends with respect to electrical and computer engineering. One of the majorthings I had to do for this project was to contact the developers of certain software to getbugs fixed and to better understand how the software works. The ninth objective was to describe, understand, and apply key tools used in theoverall electrical and computer engineering design process. Many of the key tools such asdecision matrixes, were taught to us during the design for six sigma part. Unfortunatelymost of these design tools were taught too late for them to be much use in design process.It is strongly recommended that the design for six sigma be moved to the start of theclass, where we still have the time to make design decisions. The tenth objective was to understand the benefits and potential problems ofteaming, describe qualities and processes of effective teams, and describe the role ofteamwork in system design. One of the major problems of teaming was the fact that eachmember of the team had a different idea on what the best way to solve the problem wewere given. In a way, this difference of opinion forced us to pick the best product, as wewere all trying to prove our idea better then our peers. The eleventh objective was to acquire and understand information contained incontemporary technical literature about hardware components, software, design tools,third-party suppliers. This objective is obsolete, as all the information available intraditional literature in the computer science industry is available online. The twelfth and final objective was to browse the web to acquire informationabout electrical and computer engineering, software, design tools, third-party suppliers,etc. This objective was demonstrated by my discovering of the multiseat approach. Thisapproach has not been documented in traditional literature. The primary developers of thefinal solution were made by people in Brasil, with almost no US connection. Only by anexhaustive search of the web was I able to discover the multiseat approach and ways tofix the bugs associated with the approach. I would qualify that all objectives set forth in the syllabus were met. Some weremet better then others, but all of the objectives have been demonstrated in some way. Theonly objective that was not met was the contemporary literature search. This is not reallyimportant as, companies like Google are scanning contemporary literature and making itavailable online. Design ProcessFor this project, my primary technical responsibility was to find and implement amulti-terminal solution. Initially I started with thin clients. However, after talking withLenovo, we realized that thin clients are not part of their plan and I shifted my focus tothe multiseat approach which is currently implemented. The first topic I researched wasusing LTSP for a thin client based solution. This solution was very promising and verypowerful. It allows a large number of computers to share resources with minimaladditional overhead. LTSP also allowed for trivial booting of compatible thin clients.Typically thin clients require a lot of configuration, but using LTSP and PXE booting, Iwas able to bypass most of the configuration. However, after talks with Lenovo, the thin client idea was rejected for
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