General
- Product Realization Lab (Room 36) is a good place to assemble especially if your assembly needs more tools
- Cabinet of freedom! Lots of treasures
- Try to prototype earlier during the first week of the project, so that you do not need to wait for 3D printed or laser cut parts
Mechanical
- You only need 2 supporters for a motor, not 3. More does not help but can potentially bends your shaft and cause unstable driving
- Test encoders placement to check whether they can detect period before mounting them
- Save lots and lots of space for circuits. Or you will spend great amount of time to disassemble to debug and reassemble, even a whole day for debugging only one single part
- Leave space open. Otherwise it is very likely that wires would get compressed and shorted
- Make sure wiring is accessible after assembly so you don't have to take the robot apart every time there is an electrical issue.
- Make sure the bottom tips of ball casters and wheels are at the same level. If the wheels are not loaded, the robot will slip
- Strain relief wires! Especially TIVA USB cable, motor wires, and encoder wires.
Electrical
- COMMON GROUND! Everything should share a same ground.
- Long wires are bad for signal lines
- For accelerometer, the shorter its wire, the better its performance (put it close to TIVA)
- Don't buy cheap wires. They will make your life difficult
- Shield IR sensor signal line from motor PWM line, or avoid common route, to keep IR signal from being destroyed by picked up PWM signal
- If unfortunately, messy IR signal appears, 104 capacitor (or your fingers!) across the power line of IR circuit can save your life
- Make sure power & GND lines are consistent throughout all protoboards when soldering. Otherwise, you will have big chance to keep burning things
- Similar to above, make sure power & GND sides are also consistent for all molex, or something will smoke
Software
- Raise the priority of IR sensor ISR when aligning with beacon and lower it after PWM ISR in other cases. Otherwise, IR sensor may miss IR period, or PWM close-loop control may not work smoothly
- Key stroke is a convenient way to test everything besides SPUD while waiting for the SPUD implementation