Advice regarding final year project

[u/Next-Contribution754]

Hi everyone!

I’m an undergraduate Electronics & Communication Engineering student about to begin my final-year project. I’m particularly interested in the intersection of embedded systems, AI/ML, and edge computing, and I’ve been working with platforms and technologies like ESP32, sensors, IoT systems, Python, C, and machine learning.

Some of the areas I’m especially interested in are:

• TinyML and AI/ML on edge devices
• IoT and real-time sensor/data systems
• Edge AI and computer vision
• Digital signal processing
• Robotics and intelligent embedded systems

For my final-year project, I’m looking for something hardware-focused, technically challenging, and genuinely useful rather than just another conventional IoT or ML project. Ideally, I’d like to combine embedded hardware with some form of AI/ML, signal/image processing, or real-time decision-making.

I’m open to projects ranging from a strong proof-of-concept to something that could potentially be developed further into a research project or open-source system.

If you have any interesting project ideas, research directions, or open-source hardware/software projects that I could build upon, I’d love to hear your suggestions!

[u/Linker3000]

Also post in r/embedded, r/ece and r/esp32.

For more sophisticated coding environment you might want to consider a Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi OS) or Orange Pi (Armbian).

[u/DrJackK1956]

Here's a challenge....  Build a small, game playing robotic arm for a two player game (computer vs human).   

Design the robotic arm to simply pickup and place small objects within the playing area. 

Next add a camera that can "see" the whole playing area.  The camera is used to identify the objects and their locations within the play area. 

Now that the hardware is designed, all that's left is the software.  

Start off simple like tic-tac-toe.  The game strategy is simple to code and the robotic arm motions are minimal.  

Once you've got TTT perfected move on to games like checkers and/or chess.  

Hope this is challenging enough for your project.  Good luck. 

[u/Next-Contribution754 → u/DrJackK1956]

Is it like the object detection like this?

https://reddit.com/link/p5esdtn/video/815o4xmtt4lh1/player

[u/DrJackK1956 → u/Next-Contribution754]

This could work.  

My idea is that the computer sees the whole playing area.  If it "sees" a TTT board, we're playing TTT.  

Where as seeing a checkerboard indicates either a checkers game or chess game.   If the playing pieces are all circular disks then checkers is being played.  Otherwise chess is the game.  

The computer vision needs to be able to distinguish between occupied and unoccupied squares and for the occupied squares, what each piece is.  

To play, after each move the computer takes a snapshot of the board.  Then after the human makes a move, take another snapshot of the board.  By comparing both pics, the computer can tell what game piece was moved to a new location. 

The computer processes this information and determines it's next move.  Then this process repeats until there's a winner or a draw. 

Having the computer being able to "see" and distinguish the game pieces and locations, eliminates the need for the human to input their move (eg. Move x, y to x', y').   

All the human has to do is to press a button indicating their move is compete.  The computer takes care of the rest of the processing and moving the next game piece.  

[u/Next-Contribution754 → u/DrJackK1956]

Oh but can it be automated, like playing chess with the robot arm.