Technical Details

Competitions and Media:
Intel Cornell Cup: WPU Robots Win Top Prizes
Dassault Systems: Pioneering Engineering with Solidworks
WPI: Life Saving Robots and Technical Final Paper
YouTube: WALRUS Rover

My Roles and Responsibilities:
This project was a big effort, spread out across five individual contributors. I want my role to be clear. As the solo electrical engineer (EE), I was in charge or directly involved in a wide range of tasks from electrical architecture design, to specing out off the shelf equipment (things like radios, sensors, and motor controllers), to wire harness manufacturing, and finally custom circuit board design. I assisted with the software and mechanical work here and there for fun, but stayed pretty focused on the EE portion of the project. My bread and butter was the custom circuit board design portion. There are 7 unique custom circuit boards in the WALRUS rover that are used for motor control, power distribution, lighting, displays, and sensor monitoring. I designed and tested all of them.

Project Challenges and Lessons Learned:
WALRUS was a full time job on top of my already existent full time student responsibilities. The challenges and lessons came in both technical and non technical form. I had taken the majority of my college EE courses and was eager to apply what I had learned to a practical application but I was by no means an expert in circuit board design. Prior to WALRUS I had only designed 2 boards from scratch, and honestly only 1 of those boards worked. Jumping into this head first was a big risk, but it was the right choice. I was way outside my comfort zone but I can confidently say this project gave me about 2+ years of industry level experience, so entering the workforce was a breeze. Learning how to manage my time, cope with stress, and work efficiently were all valuable skills I picked up throughout the project.

A bit more on the nitty gritty technical side though. It's funny how perspective changes. At the time I thought I was designing really good boards. I thought I was the shit. Looking back 8 years later...wow, I did so much wrong. But that's ok, it's part of the process. I want to be honest. Here are 6 lessons I learned:

1. Really spend the time to think through your system architecture. This is your foundation. If you mess it up, you're going to be really hurting. This is a big reason why many hardware products fail. If you find out too late, there may not be much you can do.

2. Design for electromagnetic noise in mind. It's going to catch up to you sooner or later. Select the most robust communications protocols you can. Think about packaging and shielding early on. Get really detail oriented. Get paranoid.

3. Learn how to enter the pencils down phase so you can properly test and iterate. It's always better to ship a product with 80% of the originally planned features that work 100% of the time, rather than ship a product with 100% of the planned features that only work 80% of the time.

4. Everything takes much longer than you think it will. It just does. Accept it and plan for it.

5. Data is your life blood. Every diagnostic, sensor, and monitoring feature is worthwhile. When failures happen you will use sensor data in ways you may not have imagined before. Don't overlook this.

6. What you get out of your college experience is what you put in.