Mine was my senior design project as well. My group got assigned to a competition to wirelessly harness energy in the GHz range. The competition used a ratio of energy to size (power / (longest edge * mass)) to rate the entries and so we decided to focus on the denominator making ours as small as possible.
We finished design and production in the first month using off the shelf parts. That left just presentations as our work for the rest of the semester. The professors kept telling us to design large complicated antennas but we double checked that a small denominator against the minimum power requirement was a solid strategy and stuck it out. At the end of the semester, our final presentation and demonstration had them applauding our decision to focus on the size over energy.
I took our tiny little thing to the competition and we hit middle of the pack against larger and much more complicated designs, some of which couldn't even support themselves (but the supports didnt calculate into your size). And most of the competitors were graduate teams. We probably would've done even better if the banana clips we had to use weren't part of the size calculations; they were significantly bigger than the rest of our contraption.
We finished design and production in the first month using off the shelf parts. That left just presentations as our work for the rest of the semester. The professors kept telling us to design large complicated antennas but we double checked that a small denominator against the minimum power requirement was a solid strategy and stuck it out. At the end of the semester, our final presentation and demonstration had them applauding our decision to focus on the size over energy.
I took our tiny little thing to the competition and we hit middle of the pack against larger and much more complicated designs, some of which couldn't even support themselves (but the supports didnt calculate into your size). And most of the competitors were graduate teams. We probably would've done even better if the banana clips we had to use weren't part of the size calculations; they were significantly bigger than the rest of our contraption.