I’ve been on HyTech Racing for over 2 years now, designing and building electronic control systems for our electric vehicles. One problem I have noticed repeatedly is that not enough care is done to document our ideas and plans each year. My hope this year is to document as much as possible about how each part of the car that we are building works. If this is done well, this will help returning members but more importantly be a great resource to new members in understanding how a vehicle like ours needs to operate.
Different FSAE teams take various approaches to designing their electronic control systems. Many teams use commercial control systems almost entirely. At HyTech Racing, we try design as much of the car as we can. On the electrical side, this leads to a very complex system that needs to be designed and built by multiple people of different levels of knowledge and commitment. The simple act of writing down requirements and documentation of the systems we are building helps in multiple ways. First, it gets people on the same page. Everybody has access to the documents and can read what each circuit board must be designed to do, or what functions a particular ECU must perform and things it must broadcast or listen for on CAN Bus. Each person designing a specific part can see how their small piece interacts with other pieces of the big picture. Second, it often elicits scrutiny. This is not to say that having documentation available negates the need for design reviews, but having this information out there for anyone on the team to view allows more people to see and question the decisions we are making. If that is done, it will likely lead to a better car.
This year we are being much more open with our communication, designs, and documentation. Our code and circuit designs are on GitHub. Our mechanical models are on Solidworks PDM so every member can access the latest version of the car. Last year our team started using Slack, which turned out to be a great decision as we grew from 20 members to 100. GroupMe wasn’t a good fit for our team two years ago, and it definitely would be a horrendous idea to use now. I heard from someone that our Slack team is the most active and inclusive community of any Slack team they are on. We often have around 3,000 messages between teammates every week (a few weeks ago I sent over 500!). This year we also set up a project management website running Kanboard, which has gone a long way in furthering team transparency. On the electrical team, I’ve been putting together requirements documents for both programming and circuit design. That includes things like the state diagram below. I hope that later in the competition year we can publish more of these documents online as they are finalized.
