TI engineers Stuti Ghiya and Muhammad Rajabali fondly remember their time as students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program at The University of Texas at Austin.
As with most engineering students, the culmination of their studies was their senior design projects. Both spent their last undergraduate year learning rapidly with other engineering students, solving challenges created and backed by corporate sponsors such as TI.
The experience has now come full circle for Stuti, a DLP systems engineer and 2012 UT graduate, and Muhammad, a DLP applications engineer and 2013 UT graduate, who are now guiding a new crop of UT students through the design program.
For the past two years, they have been developing challenges – and helping students along the way towards a solution – with the DLP® LightCrafter™ evaluation module (EVM) donated by TI.
UT students created a head-up display (HUD) capable of showing navigation information with an interface that was easy and intuitive.
In the first project they took on as mentors, the duo helped students design a 3D measurement tool for insurance adjusters to measure dents in cars. The DLP LightCrafter EVM was a key component.
“We try to make it challenging, but also something that we’re pretty conversant in,” Stuti said.
Muhammad said the challenges align with the kinds of potential products TI customers may already be considering. This year, students were asked to design a head-up display (HUD) capable of showing navigation information with an interface that was easy and intuitive.
Additional goals included creating a HUD capable of showing the car’s speed, fuel and revolutions per minute (RPM); building an interface with the driver’s phone to provide information about incoming calls and text messages; and integrating that interface with back up and side view cameras.
By the end of the year, students had succeeded in creating a developer platform with the functionality Stuti and Muhammad requested.
“It’s not something you could actually put into a car of course, but they made a tabletop demo for the project that included a HUD a driver could control over their phone via Bluetooth®,” Muhammad said. “They were also able to add GPS and pull speed data from the car.”
Beyond the real-world engineering experience, Stuti said students benefit from the program because it opens their eyes to the amount of important non-technical work required.
“Students are always very ambitious in the beginning with what they want to do. It’s great for them to dream big,” she said. “But things like writing up proposals and reports, scheduling, planning and resource allocation can be really difficult as a new engineer.”
The UT Senior Design Project program is just one example of TI’s university partnerships. In the past five years, TI and the TI Foundation have invested more than $150 million to support K-higher education. The University Program reaches more than 500,000 students around the world every year by facilitating engineering education and innovation at universities worldwide, supporting TI's commitment toward innovating for the future.
Learn more about TI's University program.
Discover more senior design projects at UT.
Find out more about DLP technology for automotive.
