2023-08-24 Electrical Leads Discussion

Going over purchasing spreadsheet with Nolan and Michael

• Go over purchasing protocol document (review it regularly)

• Money mostly comes from WEEF

• Protect EE manufacturing account for boards and custom hardware

• Try to use avionics for comp drone off the shelf items (unless budget becomes tight for other teams)

• Make proper judgement on which account to take from and consider which accounts are refreshed more often (case by case basis)

• Make sure to make a thread for each purpose

• Make cost estimates that account for taxes, customs, shipping, exchange rate for procurement

• Procurement takes longer than purchasing yourself and reimbursing

• PCBs basically needed to be ordered manually then reimbursed

• Team funds is mostly a no touch account

Moving to Microsoft stuff

• uwarg@uwaterloo.ca

Not enough bandwidth to support a new coop

• We would need to come up with more projects to be able to support a full time coop

Asana

• Works really well when we full commit to it

• Difficult to maintain Asana for everyones PCB projects

• Becomes more relevant for comp stuff

• Asana should definitely be used for comp tasks and flight test tasks

• Use altium 365 to make comments for PCB and schematic stuff

• Use Asana on higher level tasks with more description

• Clean up Asana

  • Remove all subtasks for projects for now as a cleanup

  • Leave acquisition

  • Clear the integration tasks but leave the section

Nolan and Mena experiencing new bootcampers

• no major issues

• Splitting up the bootcampers between @Mena Azab @Nolan Haines

• @Michael Botros will go over the bootcamp and the review process with @Mena Azab @Nolan Haines

  • We will make a specific confluence page for this with standards

• Don’t check in on bootcampers, let them update you (good way of finding members with initiative)

• Review process of reviewing bootcamper final submissions

• If unsure about something, either research or ping, try to avoid explaining something you might not fully understand (we’re all learning)

• Add to the first page of bootcamp a part that explains how the bootcamper needs to select the voltage and power they are regulating

• Should we give members the checklist of schematic and PCB corrections or should the members learn by doing

What’s going on right now?

• Projects are split between leads (each lead takes over certain projects)

  • works pretty well

Where each project exists

• each project has its own discord channel

  • Where the discussion and questions happen

• Every project needs to make a wiring diagram

• each project also has a pinned confluence page for each discord channel

  • really push members to document EVERYTHING for confluence

    • Examples of good projects documentation: 12S esc, buck board, high current power module

• Usually there was an Asana category for each project

• Usually an altium project for each project

Make sure they are documenting all design decisions and questions in confluence. It becomes much easier for us to follow how they’re making they’re board, how much they understand, and how we can effectively fill the gaps

Making new projects?

• Difficult to find new realistic projects for all members

  • more members join, difficult to manage each new project (boards take a lot of work)

• Buddy up members (2-3 max per project)

• Brainstorm sessions for coming up with projects

• Very hard to replace good off the shelf components

• Make dummy projects, make boards that maybe wont be ordered for comp but give good experience to members

  • Maybe some really high current 12V or 5V bucks could be quite useful?

• Need to plan for new members

• Ping other leads if you want a cross-team project (ping relevant subteam lead)

Invest in members who are showing initiative (the projects that are moving along quite well)

Need to push members to learn about drone assembly and actual drone components

Certain mundane tasks can be delegated to individual leads who will deal with it quickly

• Maybe better that the lead handles all tasks for each project

Look into giving members project manager roles and more responsibility. Give it to dedicated members and members who you can see rising to the occasion so that it’s easier to scope our future leads

Keeping up with conversation, and meetings take up the most time

• reading through each confluence and doing detailed reviews also takes time

Important to allocate time to priorities otherwise you might burnout