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Modularity: focus on common mounting solutions and existing standards for electronics and software so our system can adapt easily to new requirements and objectives. i.e. Mounting Hole & Patern Specifications and Frame Design.
Testing: testing new systems early and often has been extremely beneficial for us, let's keep this going for every subsystem! See Iterative Design Process for more details.
Competition Advantage: programs should be explicitly separated between learning only design projects versus projects we need to put significant resources toward validation on.
Affordable/Repairable: We will be crashing, let's keep stuff affordable, use budgeting effectively.
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Newer members often join design teams for resume experience and do not wish to contribute toward testing and validation. These members seek to do exclusively design work but often lack the necessary skills to produce quality work in a timely manner. For this reason we should offer learning centric projects to members who clearly state their learning focused intentions. We must be clear these projects will not receive as much funding and senior member attention as our competition oriented projects. These projects are much better oriented for having a single person contribute to them because they require no integration effort. Hopefully these projects are useful for the individual contributor who gains design experience and the team which may be able to leverage this design in the implementation of a future competition system.
Bootcamps are the biggest example of a learning only project! They receive no funding, minimal hardware allocated (if any), no timeline requirements, are resume viable, and entail some (but not a lot of) input from leadership/management.
Architecture Documents Direction
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