• Mechanical
  • Prototype skirt very early. Maybe make this the first thing you do
  • Design your prop cages as soon as you have a solid skirt prototype
  • Buy/order important components as soon as possible (propeller motors and extra batteries especially important)
  • Before cutting parts for a prototype, list all of the electrical boards that are ready to go (soldered) and make sure there are mounting holes for those boards
  • Integrate separate components as soon as possible. Give yourself time in case there are bugs with the integration.
• Electrical
  • Decide on your sensing modalities early - this will pay dividends later
  • If you’re done designing a circuit, go ahead and solder it. This will help mechanical design
  • Make sure that your prototype is safe - alligator clips and live batteries don’t go well together
  • Organize your circuits well from the beginning even if the circuits aren’t soldered yet - use braided wire and not so many jumper cables to keep things neat and safe
• Code
  • Start on communication early
  • Finish communication early
  • Test your software incrementally
  • Use the PIC instead of a TIVA (it’s a good learning exercise, the code is more readable, and the datasheet is infinitely better) but find a good socket to be able to easily remove the PIC after soldering protoboards.
• General
  • Collaborate with other groups, they are a great resource
  • Reuse as much as possible from 218B - this keeps cost down and a lot of the components/boards could be reuseable
  • Order parts early
  • Have a meeting with coach early. Looking at old projects online is one thing, talking to someone who did it already is another