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Unread 30-12-2002, 13:27
Andrew Andrew is offline
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Join Date: May 2002
Location: Little Rock, AR
Posts: 393
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We're going to try something a little different this year.

Jan. 4, Day One: Pick up kits and have evening kick off party. Watch NASA video taped earlier in the day. Disseminate rules to most of the team. Go through the bins of parts and get a viceral idea of what we have to work with.

Depending on how many people show up to the kick off, we may start brainstorming right then.

Jan. 5, Day Two: Make major drive train decisions (ie shift or not, gear ratio, motors to use). Complete basic frame, controller box, battery mounting design.

Jan. 6, Day Three: Start building controller box and battery tray. Start gear box design. Assign major sub-system designs to sub-groups for brain-storming on how to do them.

By the end of the first week, we should have picked our sub-systems and have a good idea on what we will be doing there and have them assigned to the "engineer in charge" to carry on. We should be building our drive system, base platform, controller box, battery tray and starting to wire the controller box connectors, test the speed controllers, sensors, et al. We should also be starting our operator interface design and build.

On field pieces, we may begin building "critical artifacts." However, from past experience, we don't usually need actual field pieces till about week five or six. This year, we're going to focus on getting our drive system up and running by week two-three to the exclusion of all else. At the end of every competition season, we've complained, "if only we had our drive system running by week three, we would have discovered all these little problems and been able to correct them." This year, we're going to try to "make it so."

Although we will have "locked in" some critical design decisions real quick, the only restrictions on the sub-system designs will be mounting points and non-availability of some resources. These activities (continued strategy brain-storming, determination of which modules to go to final design with) should continue well into week three. Hopefully by week three-six we will only be spending time on design and fab of our modules and not on working on our drive system.

Andrew
Team 356
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