Gems of wisdom
Be positive and make sure you surround yourselves with uplifting people to help carry you through this stressful time! You can do this!
Mechanical
Mechanical
- Know that you’ll accidentally mess up and have to recut your housing duron multiple times.
- The best time to laser cut is early morning, 8 am, right when the PRL opens.
- Reserve the 3D printer in advance! Way in advance! Do it now! The evening sessions are key for long prints since you can do it overnight.
- Look around the scrap materials section in Room 36 - you’ll find you can save a lot of money instead of buying raw pieces of duron!
- If you’re using servos, buy a few at a time - you’ll burn them out more often than you think and they’re super cheap.
- Don’t overcomplicate hardware - keep it simple and do it well!
- Buy your own soldering iron from Amazon - you’ll thank us later
- Glue down components once things start to work. As you get closer to the end, you don’t want to spend hours debugging your system to only find out that a wire came loose.
- Integrate your code service one at a time and pushing it to BitBucket when it works so you can always go back to versions you know it works. Once you have all your code working, integrate all your hardware one at a time. And integrate it one at a time again when you move all your hardware into your final packaging!
- Write your state machine and pseudocode before coding - it’ll help you while you code and others debug your code!
- Write the state machine together - this way everyone knows how the system works and can help with debugging code
- Work on building the state machines together - that way everyone knows the functionality of the system
- Working in pairs is key to maintaining sanity in the project - having a buddy to bounce ideas off of, debug code and hardware, and a companion to laugh and sing with can relieve a lot of the stress
