Gems of Wisdom

  • Understand the Project Description and create state machines early
  • Buy/Order any hardware that you need right in the first week
  • Check the connections to your motors before actually running the bot
  • Check all the solders (we mean not just the contacts but if the line is going high/low as expected as well)
  • RFID card readers can go bad if you use really long wires between them and the antenna
  • The bus pirate (UART/SPI) sniffer proved to be really useful
  • XBee's need at least about 10 sec to initialize before they start working fine
  • Beware of probing your perf board circuits with the multimeter! You can short the circuit and lose a lot of time