- Never leave your team’s tools at the lab station. Always store them in the locker before you leave the lab.
- Return lab supplies (glue guns, wood saws, files, etc.) to their original places after you finish using them. It saves your time to look for them the next time you need them.
- When you think you need something for a quick fix on your device, take a walk around the lab. You can always find some “garbage” valuable to you.
- Be familiar and be careful with SourceTree.
- Read supplier documentation very carefully. An off-the-shelf board might be not functioning due to a minor caveat hidden deep in the vendor spec sheets.
- Simplify your design from the idea generation step. If you finish your baseline design ahead of time, then go for the “stretch goals”.
- Plan your breadboard layout before you actually place anything, or you will most likely end up with rearranging the layouts to save space on breadboards or limit number of breadboards.
- Most of the time, a logic probe (analyzer) is your debugging friend. It is unnecessary to debug with an oscilloscope when the signal is at logic-level and does not switch at a high frequency.
- This project has an extremely quick turnaround, which means that you do not have time to prototype -- take care to design for manufacturability, ease of assembly, and serviceability (i.e. ease of disassembly in case of a hardware bug).
- Mechanical integration takes time!!! Plan to leave two full days in the PRL working on laser cutting, 3D printing, assembly (and iterate over for adjustments).
- Do a design review with the entire team before laser cutting to avoid missing feature cutouts on the panels.
- Never forget to put current limiting resistors to all LED-type electronics (including 7-segment displays, LED strips).
- Make sure power supply ground shares the same ground as the TIVA board ground.
- Do not use hot glue to mount components which dissipate a huge amount of heat (like a solenoid). Hot glue melts and parts fall off!
- Before ordering anything online or driving to stores off-campus, check the shops in SPDL and Room 36. They have most of the stuff you need.
- WORK HARD AND ENJOY YOUR TIME IN SPDL : )