Meeting
9pm pst loool (both of our first days of work)
Timeline
joined team Jan 2022
became lead after two terms later (July 2022)
stepping down starting Jan 2024
Onboarding Experience
he was very active so knew what was going on
wasnt too much handoff between him and Dhruv
were a couple calls, but it wasnt a leadership guide, more of a task sync
give a lot of advice on what the role of lead is and how to fill that role
tried to give that to derek
Director Influence on Projects
current director stack is very diverse and passionate (so good)
nature of EFS is small role in competition so not a lot of director direction
hopefully will start to change as EFS does more development on COTS
currently it’s kind of subpar
Thoughts on the ZeroPilot program and development
EFS should put more resources on COTS so it contributes to WARG better, was neglected as the team made a more COTS shift
before the team was very focussed on custom flight controller firmware
Milestone 1
was flying manually in fixed wing
this was what WARG had before we restarted the team
time for zp to replace ardupilot and cots stackup is a few years
biggest stuff for past few years on ZP was that ZP kept restarting, kept rewriting for a long time
takes a lot of dedicated members & leads (leads for architecture) to get stuff done
big diff between wARG and other teams (like rocketry) is the firmware is at a large scale and not individual
at rocketry each board kinda does one thing and sits on CAN bus
one person can do a single thing by themselves
each person kinda gets their own repo
for us we have one chip doing everything, lots of devs doing for one chip
here the scale is much larger
not a full time thing so people develop and leave for a week or two, and it rlly kills stuff for review time
Team Direction
past and future projects
Hopefully COTS projects are more small groupy instead of ZP which is a very large group
Chris like COTS being at forefront with ZP in parallel
lots of members for it
more individual boards from EE
CAN boards are a good example of this!
good for people to get out of ZP and more into a board of their own
PMs & Growth
able to find PMs for all major projects
all zp managers
sim
hil
picking active people is better then picking knowledgable people
willing to learn is most important
hardest part is retention, espeacilly long term retention
knowledg transfer is crucial
happy with subteam direction
hardy & derek are clutch (strong leads)
lots of good newer members
need to retain them
ofc lots of people join and drift away
Leads & AEAC Meetings improvements
meeting structure
leads meeting last term was short and sweet
Daniel had column and chart before hand, so people could look before and after, people can focus for sections they care about
saving time is important
didnt talk much during leads, a lot of it is admin stuff so lots of just listening
leads last term was prolly run best way possible
went to just a few AEAC syncs,
didn’t feel like needed to go
didnt get a lot of info out of it
didnt find them as important
just bc EFS isn’t involved in it
more cots projects will have it shift
this kind of speaks to Chris’s involvement with the team
chris never went to a comp
comp was just an extra thing that occurred
cares more about mentorship and development and architecture then the comp stuff
changing teams direction will change people’s minds
chris was into ZP just bc team was into ZP
say it how it is in the info sessions, be real with people, attract people who are interested in what we’re doing, if it’s more COTS we’ll get people for it
chris doesnt know a lot of cots stuff, more fundamentals, so this step down is a solid shift
Sysint team, do we need one
a sysint team would be
really helpful
good
somewhat neccessary
no matter what we want thsi team it’s just nobody wants to do it
the only people that do it are people who are super invested in team and passionate
Aidan fell into this bucket, but when he got busy it fizzled out
example:
on efs there’s a lotta infrastructure work
linting, github actions
everyone knows we should have it
nobody was willing to do it until derek
gotta find the right person to get those benefits, just tough to find this person
it’s technical, but also tedious
slightly unsatisfying
lots of chasing people down
not a lot of concrete accomplishments
potential plan fwd
wait a bit
find someone who is interested in the job description
can’t rlly trick someone into it, must tell them what it is
mostly chasing deadlines, architecting the system, not a lot of cold hard engineering/designing
Aidan was perfect for that role
directors shouldnt be scared bout changing things on EFS
it’s reasonable if directors make the hard decision to table ZP we can
dont want them to be circling on ZP ins
talking bout ZP
ZP is a long feedback loop, project is like at least a few years dee
LOS forced architecture, very complicated
We could go even simpler (we dont wanna restart)
but if chris could do it all again, just start with bare metal loop
a lot of stuff doing rn is good practice (future proofing) but complex
example: free rtos (not rlly required for a lot of simple stuff we tryna do)
more interation would be good
maintain functionality
the mech frame gets feedback at most every year for comp
hoping COTS projects have smaller feedback loops, better for learning, maybe better long
will play it by ear going fwd
thats it
General
Content
Integrations