Originally Posted by MimeMime

What is bad about Dr.Wassyng? I have him next semester. :S

The main problem most students have with him is he's never around. If you have a class with him, it's pretty common for the TA's to be teaching most lectures, since he's off at some conference for a month somewhere, or something along those lines. What's worse is, the TAs are usually just as lost as the students, as they aren't really given much information on what they're supposed to be teaching.

My personal problem with Wassyng is he literally tries to hide from conflict and hopes it just works itself out. For my capstone project, I couldn't get my group to do anything to the point where I went to him and asked him what to do. He told me to write an email detailing what everyone had done so far to him, and that he'd arrange a meeting.

I did that; no response for a week and he wasn't around, so I emailed him again asking if he got my email. Nothing for another week; I go talk to him the first day he's back from where ever he was, and he says "oh ya, I got your emails, I'm actually on my way back to my office to schedule something now". I wait another few days without anything, then finally go to his office and tell him we're dealing with this shit now. He finally calls my group in and they openly admit that they haven't done anything (this was March by the way). His solution is, "oh, well, just reduce your requirements and do the core components instead".

Of course, that doesn't do anything and I still end up doing most of the project myself. On the demo day, we do our presentation (my group mates making up shit since they didn't know what was going on) and I leave it at that. On the way out, he says "see? Look what you guys accomplished when you all pulled together!" with a dumbass smirk.

Seriously, fuck that guy.

^ Ouch.

It definitely felt like Dr Wassyng had little more than apathy for the course. Not fun whenone has to finish their Capstone if they want to graduate.

My group ended up pulling through and we'd probably only talked to the professor ... pretty much only when we had to, so say, the scheduled meetings everyone had. Because, y'know, his office was empty otherwise.

Talking to the TAs helped a bit, except it felt that they'd been told to evaluate projects solely on the documentation of project and not the content. At least, that was the general feeling when we asked for feedback.

My group ended up pulling through and we'd probably only talked to the professor ... pretty much only when we had to, so say, the scheduled meetings everyone had. Because, y'know, his office was empty otherwise.

What's your Capstone project?

Originally Posted by GeorgeLucas

What's your Capstone project?

Home Automation System.

We broke it down into three components -- two of these were built around Arduino boards and directly interacted with the environment. They executed the instructions from the user or sent feedback to the server when something in the environment changed (say, a light was turned off or on). I don't remember much about these two since I wasn't involved in the implementation as much as I was for the server stuff, which was my responsibility.

The third component was built around a Raspberry Pi -- we ran it as a server and it carried out the brunt of the synchronisation for the remote control of the system. The idea was you could check the state of different devices at home as long as you had access to a web browser (so anything with internet access, really). Each user had their own (password protected) profile and could set their 'preference settings' which would be stored in a database.

A lot of the software side of things were implemented and handled by the Raspberry -- I was charged with all of the frontend and backend since I was the most 'software'-inclined. Most of the stuff the user got to see was just the PHP and CSS frontend and so on. But most of the work I put was in the backend - data streaming, synchronistion and messaging - all of which were done through Python. A lot of Python.

As far as communication goes, we used XBee modules to communicate between the three components of the system. They had their own protocol, which meant we didn't need to worry about interference. Bandwidth was a bit of an issue sometimes, but not usually.

Although we had a pretty good idea what we were doing, the documentation gave us a lot of grief. That's where we kept getting torn apart by the TAs and got terrible scores for. Pretty frustrating but go figure.