Week 10 - Challenges

Now that we have been approved to order parts and begin building, it looks like the biggest challenge that we face is the time constraint. There are a few bugs in our design that can only be worked out by testing, and hopefully everything can be solved in the next few weeks. I'm sure that we could make our design better if we had another semester instead of only a month, but we have to get enough done to be satisfied with our working prototype. We will have to create a schedule and stick to it and should divide up the work into sub-systems that can be verified independently. Another challenge relating to time constraints is shipping times. While shipping is relatively fast when parts are made in the US, shipping from Asia takes 1-2 weeks. If something breaks at the last minute, it will be impossible to reorder parts from overseas, and we may have to pay very high overnight shipping fees even if the parts come form within the US. It will be better to begin building early so that we have enough time to make mistakes and don't run into these problems.