Gems of Wisdom for Future 218'ers

General

1. Start with the MVP: Start with the minimum viable product and then add to it if there's time. Lots of teams this year went big and then struggled to implement such ambitious projects. Even just the MVP will end up being a ton of work—a simple but reliable robot is better than an impressive non-functional robot.

2. Order parts early and buy a few extras: Shipping is very expensive, so buying extras the first time can save you a lot of money if it means you can avoid having to make a second order.

3. Get safety trained at the Stanford maker-spaces early: The maker-spaces get pretty crowded towards the end of the quarter. Lab64 will grant 24-hour access to people who have been a part of the lab and fully trained on all equipment for at least one quarter—if this applies to you, having 24-hour access is incredibly helpful for last-minute laser cutting and 3D printing during the busiest time of the quarter for the maker-space.

4. Make a centralized document/notion page/organization system for your team: This will help you keep all of your links to notes, images, spreadsheets, pseudocode, etc. in one place and make it easier to make your website at the end of the quarter. Make sure to update as you go! It will make passing off work and writing the report much easier.

5. Try to help with every part of the project: It's tempting to divide up the work into mechanical, electrical, and software, especially if your team's skillset is distributed that way. Inevitably, one part (usually software) will end up taking a lot longer than the others, and it's hard for your teammates to try to understand code they've never seen before a day before the due date. If everyone helps a bit with everything, then you can all help to debug things when time is limited.

6. Make a Slack team channel: Text groupchats are good for coordinating meeting times, but if you also use them for updates on milestones, files, code, images, etc., you'll likely start to feel like your personal life is cluttered with ME 218 work. It also tends to be harder to search for specific files. Slack and other similar apps make it easier to save important messages for later and document your progress.

Electrical

1. Keep wires as short as possible: Cut resistors and capacitors to be as close to the breadboard as possible, and make sure LED wires are only as long as necessary. Keeping wires short on breadboard components makes tracing wires, debugging, and swapping out components significantly less tedious—it will also reduce your likelihood of accidentally unplugging components.

2. Add strain relief where possible: Zipties and hot glue are great and fast ways of adding strain relief to your cables so you don't wear down pins that frequently need to be connected and disconnected.

3. Take a couple hours to clean up the electronics: It seem be tedious or unnecessary, but if you clean everything up ahead of time, integrating the electronics into the physical housing/enclosure will go significantly more smoothly.  Take time to shorten wires, add heat shrink, and use masking tape to bundle up wires—these will make your electronics look a lot neater and will also reduce risk of accidental shorts. Masking tape is also a great way of adding labels to wires you might not want to mix up.

Software

1. Use github/sourcetree: Make branches for new features, testing out an idea, etc., and make sure you only ever merge to the main branch when you have functioning code. This will help ensure you can always go back to a version of your code that works.

2. Don't be afraid of merge conflicts: Try resolving merge conflicts as a team a few times early in the project. Once you get the hang of it, it's quite straightforward, and allows all teammembers to contribute to the code base simultaneously. 

Mechanical

1. Organize your CAD as a group: Just as it is encouraged to make a state machine as a team, you should also plan out all of the locations of hardware and mechanical components required as a team. Our team made a "master skeleton" file that contained main sketches, planes, and axes that would be used throughout the robot. Using this skeleton as a reference for all new parts means that changing the skeleton will update all of the relevant parts as well. Especially for a large project with multiple CADers, this can reduce some headaches!

2. Limit your 3D printing: It can be tempting to try to 3D print as much as possible, but when the final project deadline get close, the last thing you want to have to do is reprint several day-long 3D prints. Laser cutting, drilling, and other faster manufacturing methods can save you lots of iteration time here.