Welcome!

We’re happy to have you on board as our new Electrical Engineering co-op! To aid your first few days here at WARG, we have created a startup guide that you can refer to to see what your project will be, key contacts, and some steps you’ll have to take.

About WARG

The University of Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group (abbreviated as ‘WARG’) is a student design team affiliated with the Sedra Student Design Centre at the University of Waterloo.

The principal objectives of WARG are:

This year, we are seeking to meet these objectives through attendance at the AEAC student competition. WARG is currently developing a quadcopter aircraft (project Pegasus) to compete in this year’s competition at the end of May.

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The Electrical subteam is responsible for architecting, designing, integrating, and validating off the shelf and custom electronics designs into our competition airframe, testing airframes, and associated ground station hardware.

This Spring 2024 term, the team is focusing on our system integration ramp up to competition in May and will then begin designing system architecture for our next competition roughly a year out. This co-op is intended to be developing projects longer term than just this competition cycle and will be decoupled from system level engineering in favor of electrical board (PCBA) level engineering.

Administrative Details

Key Contacts

Manager: Daniel Puratich

Team Directors: Daniel Puratich Megan Spee Nathan Green

Mentor: Nolan Haines

Waterloo Works Support: Mia Weston

SDC Support: Graeme & Prof Teertstra

Pre-first-day items

Joining Discord

The team uses discord to communicate!

Safety Training

Before your first day, please complete the following courses:

You can access these courses by going to Learn, selecting “Self Registration,” and enrolling in these courses.

Some of these you may have already completed for other university courses and are required by the university to keep you safe in our bay!

Joining Management Softwares

We use Asana to manage tasks and timelines and Confluence to handle documentation. You should use your uwaterloo.ca email. If you do not have access to these services, ask your manager to provide you with an invite.

Meeting Cadence

You will have a 1:1 with your manager once daily. The time will be coordinated in the team’s google calendar.

Your subteam, Electrical, meets on a weekly basis (meeting times are scheduled at the start of the term). You’ll also be expected to attend general meetings, and other relevant meetings as needed. Our meeting schedule can be found in our google calendar in #info .

AEAC sync and leads meeting are optional meetings where we discuss system integration and admin for the team respectively. Flight tests occur sporadically, generally on weekends. You are welcome to join these, but are not required to.

First Week Items

Next Steps

Project specifics will be discussed during the first week and tracked with tasks in Asana, but the initial outline I have in mind is:

  1. Protection circuit additions to existing buck converter PCBAs

  2. Zeropilot PCBA next rev: new micro, replace power electronics

  3. Gemini PCBA improvements

  4. Tracking Antenna PCBA improvements

Appendix

Useful links