Gems of Wisdom
Mechanical
Electrical
Software
- Cabinet of Freedom has H-bridges, motor couplers, pillow bearings, L brackets--get em before they’re gone!
- Keep in mind wire routing (and connectors) when designing
- Make things that are easy to take assemble and disassemble, you’ll probably have to take things apart a lot
- Applies to electronics as well!
- Famous last words: “this is the last time we’re reassembling this”
- Labeling all the wires makes plugging in things faster
Electrical
- Wire management is no joke! Wires that are too long can make things unnecessarily messy
- Lot of wires broke off from the molex crimp from lots of bending over time--heat shrink helped with mechanical support
- Test circuits on breadboard before committing to the perf board!
- Have a board to breakout the tiva pins
- Use dip sockets for chips so that it’s easy to replace them if any of them die
Software
- Draw out the state charts early on, and do this all together so everyone is on the same page
- Push code often to keep good record of changes
- Make different branches for developing different modules, and do testing before merging
- Have a separate key_map service to make testing easy
- Do HSMs! They’re worth the time investment to learn, the microwave example is a good reference