Lab 2

We're going to undertake several activities in today's lab. It's gonna by fun and busy!

• Intros: meet your team!
• Team names: your team needs a name
• Team google drive: you need one!
• Sensor board schematic design review
• Concepts: discuss concepts with your team and staff

Team assignments came out this week. Very exciting!

If you have not already met in-person as a team, now is the time to do that. If you've already met, skip to the next section.

You may not have experienced the joy of an ice-breaking activity since freshman year, so take a moment to introduce yourself to the members of your team! Spend a few minutes getting to know everyone, their reasons for taking this class, their backgrounds, and skill sets.

Your team needs a name. Spend a few minutes brainstorming on one. Once you have it, enter it here.

Enter your team name:

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The staff will do sensor board schematic design reviews on a team-by-team basis. Below is what we'll do during the review, but no need for the teams to do anything in this section until you get called in for the review.

Everyone should have their schematic finished in Altium and submitted as part of EX01.

Now, let's go through the designs on A365 and review each one.

What are we looking for? Primarily errors, but reviews are also a chance to give out tips.

Here are some things to look out for:

• Are the two sensor chips in the design, and are all their pins wired up correctly?
• Are all the needed passives, such as decoupling capacitors, included and wired up correctly?
• are there test points on each important line? And at least one status LED (with resistor) on the power line?
• Are the two necessary connectors in place and wired up?
• Are all the components of the right package?

If we find errors during the review, no worries. That's what the reviews are for! Better now than later! We can make a comment in A365 on the particular component or wire, so the designer can quickly fix their mistakes, or if the issues are minor we can fix on-the-fly.

Checkoff 1:
Each team member should ask for a checkoff at the start of their review.

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Now, on to the project. Each team member created two concepts as part of EX01.

1. Go around and present your concepts to each other. Each person should spend a few minutes describing each of their concepts, why they designed it that way, what they like about it, and what questions it raises.
2. Then have a bit of discussion and Q&A from the rest of the team.
3. After all the concepts are out there, it is time for some free-form discussion of pros/cons of each concept. Staff will be around to answer questions and weigh in.

Now comes the hard part -- you need to pick two concepts to bring forward. There is no "manager" to make this decision for you -- it is a team decision.

Making decisions in an egalitarian team is not always straighforward. More information on managing teams is on the course website. And of course we'll have help from Abby Berenson in Sloan on this. Here's one strategy that we find helpful:

1. Allow free-form discussion until 1h prior to end of lab.

2. Once 1h is left, see if consensus has emerged. It is possible that you have two concepts that get everyone excited, or that several of the concepts are variations of a single idea that you can push forward.

3. If there are more than two consensus choices, try "dot voting" aka "Chicago-style voting". Each team member gets 6 tokens, which they can allocate however they wish to the set of concepts. So one person can put all their tokens on one concept, someone else can put 4 on one concept and 2 on another, someone else can divide their tokens equally across 3 concepts, and so on. Make sure to vote independently, aka vote privately and then reveal your votes collectively.

4. Then, for each concept, calculate and plot:

   • number of voters: the number of team members who placed at least one token on that concept. This is an estimate of consensus.
   • intensity: the average number of tokens/voter on that concept (non-zero votes only). This is an estimate of passion.
   • Plot the (number of votes, intensity) for each concept.

5. This should help focus the discussion on a subset of the concepts (the ones in the top right). This may engender further discussion, and perhaps even another round of voting.

Once you have picked your two concepts, call over a staff member to get checkoffs. Again, everyone on the team should submit for this checkoff.

Checkoff 2:
Show your two concepts to a staff member.

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