Gems of Wisdom
Components
Scheduling
- Buy good drive wheel encoders and mount them in a relialble way to avoid delays and detours later during integration.
- Plan ahead of time where components are going to go on the bot. Later, as you add more and more components, it will be harder to organize wires, and find room for the components.
Scheduling
- Keep track of your parts and tools. Otherwise, they will disappear.
- Plan the following phases of your project and stick to the deadlines if at all possible: high-level design and strategy formation, detailed design/build/test iterations, integration, strategy refinement, finishing touches. If you don't hit the phase deadline dates, take a step back and determine if you can still proceed with something that is **good enough**.
- Respect the amount of time that integration takes. While all team members can go full-bore on individual components, usually only 1 or 2 can be actively working on the main bot once integration starts.
- The board frees up at around 3am. Could be worth it to alter your schedule for a week in order to get free board time to test. :)
- Give yourself enough breaks. Even though it seems unproductive, the time spent outside of the lab doing nothing really helps your time in the lab being actually productive. This especially helps if your team is struggling through a problem.
- Start building as soon as possible - although it is very helpful to take the time to plan and design everything thoughtfully, in reality you don't have much time, and getting started with implementation early will help a lot.
- Beforehand, or as soon as the project starts, assemble plenty of consumables for prototyping circuits: wire; male-male, male-female, and female-female jumpers; a well-organized assortment of resisters; bypass caps; perf boards; etc.
- Keep your designs simple - you only have ~2 weeks to implement, and even the simplest designs will take time to carry out. Especially true depending on how much time each team member has to spare.
- Download microvision and teraterm onto your laptop. It is almost impossible to test and iterate software without this.