Gems of Wisdom

General Approach

• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
• Include your coaches as a part of your design phase during brainstorming. They volunteered to help out, take advantage of that help.
• Remember to practice the KISS design philosophy (Keep it Simple, Stupid)
• The outcome of your project won't matter in 5 years. The experiences you endured, lessons you learn, and colleagues you collaborate with will matter. Look around the Lab, be ready to see these same faces in the future in either Academia or Industry.
• A good decision on little sleep is often a bad decision in hindsight.
• Gorilla Glue. Solder. Build things to a fidelity that you would be proud to show off in the showcase cabinet.
• Be prepared for Fire and Rain. Literally.
• Build on the ideas of others. All design is redesign.
• Fulfill the base requirements first. If you have extra time, go ahead and spice it up, but base req's first.

Team Dynamics

• Keep each other updated on your progress, it helps your accountability and lets others have an idea what you're doing.
• Have an agenda before each meeting. It keeps the meeting going, and will help prevent wasting time or missing topics.
• Shower. Please Shower daily. Please be considerate of your lab mates and maintain personal hygiene.
• Keep a list of concrete action items.

Structural Design

• Have access points for when the project is assembled. You don't want to reach in and accidentally pull out all the circuitry.
• When laser cutting, make sure to take into consideration the size of the cutting surface as well as for the possibility of the laser being slightly off from the sides.
• Cut your parts early. Other teams will also be cramming at the end. It also helps to have that structure to more concretely fit things where they need to be and know how much space you actually have.

Electronic Design

• Spend the extra hour or two to organize all the circuits onto a board that allows for easy integration with structure.
• Follow the good practices that are suggested in one of the earlier labs; it really does make a huge difference when it comes to debugging time.
• Do not solder unless absolutely necessary. However, if you choose to go with breadboards for your final project make sure they are neat and tidy, with properly sized wires and components so that the parts never move even with significant vibration.
• Write down (ideally document properly) the preliminary calculations you do for the first iteration of circuits you build; having this handy really helps in tuning later on in the project, especially after integration.

Software Design

• We had two programmers, with interconnected SMs. We had several times that we each individually assumed certain event types or where the work was happening. These didn't always match up and we solved them by sitting down together and correcting the code. It would have saved us several hours if we had spent some more time planning interfaces.
• Having an online C compiler open on your browser is a super fast way to check that your calculations are doing what you expect, especially in terms of typing and #define statements.
• Be ready to accept that someone else's idea of how to integrate SMs or do a specific function might be better/easier. Trying to be the lone warrior can be very hurtful.
• While the easier option is often better, there are times when a little cleverness saves a lot of potential mistakes and yields much more robust code. So, take a few minutes when it seems like there should be a better way, because there might be some low-hanging fruit.