Gems of Wisdom

• People jumped a lot of hoops to get pink foam in the latter part of the quarter. We found out after that you can get it at a Home Depot in San Carlos; just use the product locator on the website
  
• If you need electrical components, especially ICs, try Anchor Electronics (they're open on Saturday!). Or if you want surplus stuff, try HSC electronics.  They are both very close to each other. 
• Waterproofing is overrated.  Try to keep things dry, sure, but it's more important to have good drainage since you won't be able to keep all water out all the time.
  
• Don't bring expensive tools into lab. Though malice is never intended, tools do go missing or break.
• Though we never did, it is entirely possible to do much of your work outside the lab if you have a PIC programmer. 
• Run all code at once; e.g don't just test a Transmit state machine and Receive state machine separately (blocking code is relative).
• Use the PICS provided exclusively. You have to use a PIC no matter what so you might as well keep all programming consistent. E128s have many ports but are not worth the risk of breaking. With the knowledge we have after 3 quarters, expanding ports should be a piece of cake (i.e shift registers, UART network...). 
• DO NOT spend all your time on one prototype. You end up stuck with that design. Iterating is a very key process. 
• DO NOT go overboard with motors. It does not make sense to have a 30A motor on such a small boat. 
• Driving asap is extremely important to make sure you have all your control algorithms correct. 
• Use UART whenever you can. If a PIC has to talk to the Xbee over UART that doesn't mean you must use SPI to talk to another PIC. Just send messages over UART that the Xbee will not understand, but other PICs will.