The LIA project: one system, five milestones
420-302-VA · LIA PROJECT · FALL 2026

420-302-VA · LIA term project · Fall 2026

One system. Five milestones. Your theme.

The LIA is 40 % of the course: in pairs, you design, build and publicly demonstrate a complete IoT system, one that senses something real, decides something about it, acts on the world, and shows itself to a browser. The theme is yours to choose; the architecture is the one the course built from Week 8 to Week 11; the method is the one every hub rehearsed. This hub is the project's standing reference from the opening in Week 11 to the demonstration on Thursday, December 10.

40 % · in pairs · public demo D1 to D5 · Nov 16 to Dec 10

The project, in one paragraph

Take the bench you already run, ESP32 node publishing over MQTT to a Pi that decides, acts and serves a dashboard, and point it at a theme you care about. Swap the sensor, the rule and the actuator; keep the architecture; document it the way the course has documented everything; and climb a ranked list of feature rungs so that the system is demonstrable every single week. Five deliverables mark the climb: a proposal, a walking skeleton, a mid-build rung, the near-complete system, and the public demonstration. Nothing in that sentence is new; the project is the course, applied.

What governs what

The LIA brief on Omnivox governs: every deliverable's exact required contents, submission format, deadlines and grading come from the brief and the Fall 2026 course outline, and where this hub and the brief ever differ, the brief wins. What this hub adds is everything the brief cannot do for you: the method for choosing and scoping an idea, the week-by-week way of working, the evaluation logic behind the milestones, and the reference shelf. Read the brief end to end first; then live here.

Five milestones, four weeks

The project timeline from Week 11 to Week 15. D1, five percent, Week 11, November 16, the proposal. D2, five percent, Week 12, November 23, the walking skeleton, studio week. D3, five percent, Week 13, November 30, one tiny rung, flagged final exam the same day. D4, fifteen percent, Week 14, December 7, the heavy milestone. D5, ten percent, Week 15, Thursday December 10, the public demonstration. Under the line, a weight bar shows the forty percent split into five blocks of five, five, five, fifteen and ten. D1 · 5 % W11 · Nov 16 proposal D2 · 5 % W12 · Nov 23 walking skeleton D3 · 5 % W13 · Nov 30 + final exam, same day D4 · 15 % W14 · Dec 7 the heavy one D5 · 10 % W15 · Thu Dec 10 public demo 5551510 The 40 %, to scale: D4 and D5 together outweigh the three checkpoints combined. Plan backwards from the heavy end. Deliverable contents, submission and grading: the brief on Omnivox.
The whole project, to scale. Checkpoints early while changes are cheap, weight late when the system is real, and one deliberate squeeze: Week 13 is half-width, shared with the final examination. Every scoping rule in this hub follows from this one figure.

One system, six slots

Every qualifying project is the course architecture with your content in its slots: a PV your sensor measures, topics that carry it, a setpoint and rule that decide, a u that acts on the world, the disturbances you will demonstrate against, and a dashboard that shows it all. The brief page runs the six-slot test in full, with the four idea shapes for pairs still choosing. The hardware stays bench hardware unless the brief says otherwise: ESP32 for sensing and acting where it fits, the Pi for broker, rule, bridge and dashboard, the Week 9 topic grammar throughout.

How to use this hub

Choosing & scoping

The brief, decoded

The six-slot test, the four idea shapes, and the three scope rules: skeleton first, rungs ranked, Week 13 small.

Delivering

The five milestones

D1 to D5 one by one: date, weight, what each demonstrates, the evidence the repo holds, where evaluation focuses.

Working

Method & repo

The pair agreements, the repo's documentation spine, the Git rhythm, and the weekly cycle from stand-up to tag.

Being graded

Evaluation & demo day

What markers look for across every deliverable, the demo-day protocol, the rehearsal rule, and the freeze.

When it goes wrong

Risk patterns

The six ways course projects historically fail, each with its early-warning sign and its rescue move.

Looking things up

Reference shelf

Every manual the course verified, organized by subsystem, plus the week hub that taught each layer.

The weekly hubs still carry what happens on Mondays: the project opened in Week 11 with D1, Week 12 is the studio where D2's skeleton walks, and Weeks 13 to 15 carry D3 through D5 as the course calendar shows.