Power Systems Onboarding
Welcome to Power Systems! Here are a few things to do to get oriented with our system.
General Stuff
Get the Slack app on your computer and phone! It’s important to check this often and try to respond within a couple hours to DMs and mentions. A few cool channels to join include #hardwarehomies, #software, #advice, #career, and #cooking. Feel free to join anything else you think is interesting. Also join the general LHR Slack, as this is where you’ll get all org-wide communication.
Power Systems meetings are every Monday from 8-9pm, usually followed by a work session or breakout convos. If you can’t make this time, please let me know and we can work out a new time!
Make sure to join the LHR and LHRs calendars so you don’t miss any upcoming events.
One of our sponsors, Eplan, made a documentary of us preparing for and competing at FSGP this summer. They’re showing the movie on 9/17 at 7:30pm in Welch 3.502. I promise y’all will enjoy it and there will be food! RSVP here.
Chuy’s social today!!!!!! After workday pls pls pull up :P
Software Setup
Git/Github - Ensure you’ve accepted our invite to the lhr-solar Github organization. Then follow this page to install Git and learn the basics.
KiCad - We use KiCad to design all of our printed circuit boards (PCBs). Follow our KiCad Setup instructions to install.
ClickUp - Make sure to setup ClickUp and join our workspace. We keep track of all Power Systems Tasks to ensure we stick to timeline.
STM32CubeMX - Download the latest version of CubeMX by following these steps. This software allows us to work with the microcontrollers on our custom circuit boards.
Embedded Development - Install WSL and our environment by following these instructions. This is what you’ll use to develop firmware for our boards.
Homework
Hardware starter project - KiCad Bluetooth PCB
Follow these tutorials to learn the ins and outs of KiCad. I encourage you to pause the video and attempt to do each section on your own, then watch it and make any fixes. If you’re confused about why he does something a certain way or run into any issues, please reach out to me or any subleads. We’re always here to answer your questions :)
(Sponsored) KiCad 7 STM32 Bluetooth Hardware Design (1/2 Schematic) - Phil's Lab #127- (Sponsored) KiCad 7 STM32 Bluetooth Hardware Design (2/2 PCB) - Phil's Lab #128
Try to knock out as much as possible during workday, but you probably won’t get through all of it. Work on anything you don’t finish throughout the week so you can get started on your first actual project next workday!
To submit this, create a branch on the Starter Projects repo and add your files there. Then create a pull request and follow our review process to get it approved.
Software starter project - Writing & Debugging Firmware
We’re not done making this yet…but should be done in the next couple days. So don’t worry about this for now.
The goal of this project is to teach you to write a bit of embedded firmware to output some text to your serial console, along with toggling pins and debugging with a logic analyzer.
You’ll get a Nucleo development board soon, which you’ll program and test to prove that your code works.