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Sidharth Babu : Team Captain from Summer 2023 - Summer 2024
Additions by Jacob Yan : Chief Engineer from Summer 2023 - Summer 2024
Background / Context
In the Spring of 2024, I decided to reinstate the tradition of doing formal design reviews as part of Solar's workflow. Prior to this, the most recent wave of formalized design reviews was back in the Fall of 2020, and as such, had fallen out of common practice. Furthermore, due to us not doing them, we also lost the knowledge on how to do them.
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One very important thing to note. Solar has always been a bit more akin to a "research lab", at least, while I've been on the team. We have a penchant for pursuing moonshot projects that are extremely innovative, but are not short-term projects. To that end, our design reviews may look a little different than other teams, who primarily focus on pure vehicle development.
Finally, its important to note that mechanical systems have a different design process than electrical systems so I have included a different set of design reviews and guidelines below.
Inviting alumni:
I suggest you try to invite alumni as much as you can. They will be the most supportive and most knowledgeable about solar outside of any current member or lead. I was not able to invite any to SRR due to planning errors, but I did invite them to the 2024 electrical PDR.
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The University of Texas at Austin
POSITION | Longhorn Racing Solar
Cell: (XXX) XXX-XXXX
Email:XXXX@utexas.edu
Outline of each review (Electrical):
SRR: System Requirements Review
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- Presentation of final deliverable
- Presentation of "user guide"
- Locked and tagged release of all files necessary to recreate system from scratch (both hardware and software)
Outline of each review (Mechanical):
SRR: System Requirements Review
- What problems are we solving?
- What are our high level goals for our system?
- What is our minimum viable product for this current vehicle?
- What are our primary performance metrics we want to hit for this car?
- Length of meeting dependent on system scope
- The result of this review is to get everyone on the team in agreement with the overall design goals for the system that will inform brainstorming efforts
CoDR: Conceptual Design Review
- Leading options from all brainstorming efforts for overall structure of systems
- List of secondary projects important to car development
- Back of the envelope calculations to evaluate feasibility
- Evaluation of costs/benefits of each system structure option with respect to design, interactions with other systems, and manufacturing
- Evaluation of dev effort and potential benefit of each secondary project
- Ranking of all possible choices for system structure given the analysis done
- Ranking of secondary projects based on which should be finished first
- Try to be as expansive as possible in all of your possibilities for brainstorming. If there are structures that you chose not to pursue, make sure to mention them as even bad ideas can have good concepts that can be implemented elsewhere. Be ready to mix your ideas by taking the best aspects from each
- There should be a lot of discussion for this review as its important for deciding the direction that everyone's effort goes towards. I would allocate minimum the same time for discussion as for the presentation itself
- Most secondary projects will be either self led enough or minor in scope enough that they don't require a future review and can just be internally reviewed, but if there is a project large/important enough don't hesitate to discuss it in the future
- The result of this review should be a choice of direction for an overall design and which secondary projects should be pursued. However, non-favored designs should be kept in reserve in case the primary choice presents difficulty in actual implementation
PDR: Preliminary Design Review
Vehicle cycle specific items:
- Full implementation in CAD, overview
- Discussion of how the design holds up to design goals/metrics
- Discussion of any unforeseen issues
- Preliminary manufacturing plan
Secondary projects
- Optional depending on scope/importance of secondary projects
- Discussion of initial results/issues
- Updates on scope/cost/need for the project
MDR: Midpoint Design Review
- This one may be optional / conducted on a system by system basis
- How have designs progressed?
- Have cost calculations updated / changed?
- Are there changes in direction that need to be discussed and why?
CDR: Critical Design Review
- Presentation of final design
- Reiteration of performance metrics
- Full Manufacturing plan/methods and cost breakdown
- Highlight any areas of concern
- Final manufacturing and delivery timeline
- Final deliverable outline
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