The Electronics Design Lab (EDL) course (EE 344) is a capstone design project course for third year undergraduate students in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay, where they execute projects in teams to develop electronic systems to solve practical problems.
I taught the EDL course as lead instructor in Spring 2023, Spring 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters, and will be teaching it in Spring 2026 semester. In these editions of the course, I thoroughly revamped the course by introducing evaluation based on intermediate milestones to help students better plan the pace of their project development, lectures and workshops on practical aspects such as PCB design gotchas, 3D drawing, single-supply circuit design, product engineering and debugging etc., and emphasis on prototyping and ‘making’ using facilities at the Experiential Learning Lab (ELL) housed at the Wadhwani Electronics Lab (WEL). I was supported wholeheartedly by all associate instructors, and staff and RAs at WEL in this transition, and collectively we have raised the bar of projects taken up in this course, leading to prototype development with high technology readiness level (TRL).
A key strength of EDL lies in its emphasis on documentation, review, and reflection as integral parts of the engineering process. Each team maintains live design documentation throughout the semester and produces a well-structured archival repository at the end of the course, ensuring that projects are reproducible and extensible beyond the classroom. The course follows standardized grading rubrics, continuous documentation practices, and decentralized mentoring by faculty, teaching assistants, and technical staff, collectively enabling students to deliver robust, well-engineered prototypes with a high level of technical maturity by the end of the semester. Peer reviews, design critiques, and final public demonstrations further reinforce professional communication and evaluation skills. The course structure and pedagogy have been designed to be scalable and replicable, offering a robust model for enhancing electronic design education across engineering programs while fostering confidence, creativity, and engineering rigor among students.
Glimpses of some of the most outstanding projects in EDL are provided in YouTube videos below. Check out the full playlist of noteworthy projects from these editions of EDL here.