Project Planning
- It's pretty easy to let your guard down for the 218C project, since, well... it's 218C! To keep morale up and complete an awesome project, try to find each member of the team some aspect of the project that they're super excited about (e.g. a cool aesthetic theme, elaborate software, ambitious hardware, etc. etc.).
- Identify key tasks and do project planning as early as possible. Decide on your manpower allocation early. Design a thorough development plan early, complete with checkpoints and testing procedures for every major subsystem.
- Practice 'critical path planning': for any vital system or task, figure out the intermediary steps and the deadlines they need to be met by.
Hovercraft Design
- Do your homework, do your research. There's a treasure trove of applicable material online if you dig even a little bit. Our hovercraft was practically designed using just internet hobbyist sites.
- Steal good ideas from previous projects and your teammates. Gain inspiration from others' work.
- Achieving basic hover is surprisingly easy; achieving stable but maneuverable hover is an order of magnitude more difficult.
- Prototype different hover methods early. Study successful hovercrafts from previous years for inspiration.
- Your key design goals should be stability, controllability, and mobility, in that order. First, aim for a stable hover with low friction, then build in maneuverability using careful weight distribution and your propulsion system.
Mechanical Design
- Don't underestimate the amount of time it takes to develop a mature, manufacture-ready CAD model.
- Go the extra length to think about ease of assembly and maintenance. You'll thank me later in the project.
- Prototype early, prototype often, and build each prototype with the understanding that it may turn into your final product. This goes double if you are planning an ambitious design feature.
- Do your component selection and purchasing early. Buy extras and test newly purchased hardware as soon as you can.
Electrical Design
- Actually design your circuits before you build them. No, don't laugh, I'm serious. Yes, actually do design calculations. Yes, characterize your motors. Also, keep the design schematics (duh).
- Obsessively double- and triple-check power connections.
- Update electronic schematics as you go along, so both teammates and TAs can understand what's going on in each board. And they can help you debug circuits if you runs into any issues.
- It's better for you to solder all the circuits on protoboard as soon as possible after you tested everything on breadboard. Loose wires on breadboard is very easy to cause short circuit and malfunction.
Software Design
- Print each byte that you send/receive to terminal. It makes debugging much easier.
- Learn to use the logic analyzers early. They will be your best friend.
Miscellaneous
- If something goes wrong and you feel the pull of anxiety and panic, deliberately take a break (I recommend a shake or ice cream at Axe and Palm) to clear your head(s). Anxious minds compound problems. This goes doubly if you're sleep-deprived.
- Know when to get the heck out of SPDL.