- The community tools will disappear the first week of the project, and you will be left wandering around the lab at 3AM looking for the crimping tool. Save yourself some time and purchase your own tools (crimping tool, Allen wrenches, etc.).
- Buy all the tape that you will need (duct, masking, electrical, etc.) and write your team number on the inside of the rolls. Then accept that other teams will still steal your tape anyways, so lock it away in a locker!
- Triple-check the polarity of all capacitors and the power supply direction. Also be wary of the voltage ratings for the capacitors.
- Tips for building an infrared signal conditioning circuit:
- Use large potentiometers (~20-200K) to determine gain values. Once the sample beacons are ready for your project, you can probe each IC output and tune the potentiometers until the waveform looks desireable throughout the circuit. Measure the resistance of each potentiometer, and replace them with fixed resistor values + small potentiometer (~25% of resistor value).
- Solder IC sockets to the protoboard, rather than soldering op-amps and comparators directly. This will prevent overheating the ICs, and will allow you to swap out components quickly if needed.
- If you implement multiple gain stages, be sure to use a pull-down resistor before the input to the latter op-amp. This will reduce the noise being introduced to the circuit. Furthermore, try to keep any signal-conditioning circuits away from motors.
- Make it easy to recalibrate all of your sensors at a moments notice. There may be a sudden change in the playing environment, and you need to be able to quickly accommodate for that.
- Be mindful of what goes on in your interrupt service routines. If you are posting an event to another service, then be aware of how often that interrupt might be firing.
- Noise in circuits is a very real thing. Be mindful of where your wiring is running and don't use extra wire if you don't need to.
- Plan out where each circuit is going to be physically placed on the robot before cutting anything. Make sure everyone is on the same page regarding this placement.
- Don't rely on the field to be working exactly one-hundred-percent perfectly. Make you control algorithms robust to incorrect field readings.
- Start soldering you boards together and creating Molex harnesses early! It'll save you lots of time if you don't have to make and debug all of your circuits twice (once on the breadboard, once on the protoboards).
- Remember: check-off comes first, the competition comes after. Aim for base functionality before getting fancy.
- As soon as you remove a depleted battery from the vehicle, throw it on the charger! Ensuring that you always have two fully charged batteries will make testing miles easier.
- Make all harnesses 1.5x as long as necessary; the wires can always be bundled together later.
anything that physically interacts with the field (especially electromagnets) need to be tested in as close to competition conditions as soon as possible. - Doing this will help your team identify any possible fatal flaws in your design.