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Iron out communication code early. It makes life at the end of the project way more fun.
Have good relationships with other teams and help each other figure out hard problems.
Communicate with your team members more rather than less and keep each other informed of recent developments as well as upcoming tasks
Mechanical
Foam core can do more than you might think, all while weighing less than Duron and being a whole lot easier to cut by hand.
Make sure your bot has enough power to complete the project task. Friction can be non-negligible.
For hovercrafts, spend the extra time to implement H-bridges for bi-directional prop control, allowing the bot to back out of corners when it gets stuck.
Prototype the skirt design early and plan on having to make multiple iterations. We ended up making about 7 different iterations before settling on a final design.
Plan space for mounting boards. Eventually your design might end up with a dozen soldered boards and cramming them on top of each other makes for a painful debugging experience.
Electrical
Have bypass capacitors, especially on power rails that involve communication lines. The rule of thumb is to have one 0.1uf monolithic per chip, plus a 100uf electrolytic and 10uf tantalum per board.
Don't leave MOSFET gate lines floating, especially the IRLZ34N. It can get hot enough to scorch foam core if the signal line isn't asserted.
Use switches to control high-power components independently. It is much easier to test communications pairing when the thrust and lifts fans aren't trying to drive the bot around.
Dedicate one board to just logic distribution. There are a lot of pins coming out of the Tiva and a bird's nest of wires is never fun to debug.
Start a spreadsheet of Tiva pins and mark when they are taken so that people don't try to use the same pins.
Software
Use version control. It doesn't matter whether it is the command line, a GUI, or something else. Being able to roll back software to the state it was at 30 minutes (or 3 days) ago is a huge relief when one small change breaks the whole project.
Insulate your modules effectively and provide intuitive interfaces to other software so that integration goes smoothly.
Integration of software modules is a non-trivial task and sometimes takes longer than the development of individual modules. Integrate early and often.
Don't call initialization code (like InitPWM()) more than once. If it is getting called in separate programs there may be undefined behavior.
Use #defines for all constants except for maybe 0. It makes it much easier to flip values later on from a centralized location.