Our final project will involve building a Freeduino and using it to do something awesome. That, of course, is the grading criteria: do something awesome. (Further evaluation criteria on the final project to follow.)
Mind you, I also like it when you do a project that is challenging, but (more importantly) can be accomplished in the time allowed. If you pick a project for yourself that cannot be done in less than three years, and you accomplish nothing, then you've just demonstrated that you're a horrible project planner and/or cannot achieve goals you set for yourself. (Achieving your goals will be an important part of the evaluation.)
So, where does that leave us?
1. Do something awesome.
2. Set a goal for awesomeness you can achieve.
But what will that awesomeness look like?
Project Examples
More than 100K Arduinos have been used by people around the world for a wide range of projects. I did some searches along the lines of "arduino art project" or "arduino computing project" and found quite a few things.
The Arduino Playground (a wiki, and therefore maintained by the Arduino community) contains a long list of projects.
There are a number of (substantial) art projects highlighted at designplaygrounds.com (page 1, page 2).
You can go through the archives of MAKE magazine by category; here's the Arduino category at MAKE magazine.
Some guy made an Arduino-based microcomputer. Awesome. Probably not useful to you, but I've included the link for my own reference.
Hack N' Mod made a list of what they perceive as the top 40 Arduino projects on the WWW. Some (very) ambitious stuff there, but it might serve as a starting point.
Some students made a UAV (autonomous/robotic aircraft) using the Arduino and occam-π. This overlaps a lot with what we are doing...
You can take a look at the tools we'll be using at concurrency.cc. Not really a source of project ideas, per se, but you'll want that URL.
Pieces Parts
You can get pieces parts for your projects from a plethora of places.
SparkFun is a great source for bits. There are lots of things here. You may get inspired either from the blog posts about new products, or just by browsing the parts list.
Adafruit is either my #1 or my #2 go-to place for cool Arduino bits, depending on the day of the week. Also a great resource. (ladyada has some incredible documentation as well.)
The MAKE Shed is the MAKE magazine online store. Also a good source for bits and ideas.
4. http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/
It will take us a few days extra to order from them, but Seeed Studio has some great components as well.
6. RobotShop
7. Pololu
There are many more sources, most likely. However, those get you started. I recommend browsing, reading, and keeping a list of ideas in your lab notebook. Note things that you think are cool, or that you don't understand.
Ask Questions
PLEASE ask questions. Specifically, use Piazza or the mailing list to ask questions about the pieces parts.
I have taught myself a great deal over the past 8+ years about electronics, mainly because I am interested in programming languages. (Specifically, I'm interested in how we program hardware in safe and usable ways... and that means understanding everything from language design all the way down through compilers and into the hardware.) Asking questions, reading, asking more questions, reading, experimenting, reading... this is the learning cycle. You need to engage in it if you're going to learn what these bits are and how you might use them in your final project.
