End of Phase One!

It’s been a month into the CFS project, work has increased from what I had expected, and not to mention the excitement has equally risen. The last month was quite eventful, and this post is to sum it up.

As I chalked out in my previous post, this project is not only about building a formula student vehicle, it starts with building the team. Well, this is what we started off with. As a team we spent about 10+ hours deciding on a team goal, a couple more hours deciding the team rules. These two activities were an ice-breaker for the multi-cultural team. Apart from the activities, things like cleaning the workspace and dining out also helped in integrating the team.

Finally, after 3 days and spending more than 10 hours, the team goal we decided on was:

“To become skilled and knowledgeable engineers, we challenge ourselves to build a respectful and communicative goal-oriented team that, through data-driven decisions and a holistic approach, delivers a reliable, sustainable, high-performance Formula Student car and a business venture to reach the podium at FS and FSG 2014.”

The pre-study phase, as it was called, also focused on understanding our role as a subgroup towards building the car, which again started with us choosing a goal for our subgroup.

To hone our technical skills and develop ourselves as engineers, we, through test- and data-driven development, contribute to the project as a whole by building a reliable, sustainable, high-performance electrical system for the CFS14 car to fulfill our team goal at FS14 and FSG14.

Today we formally end the pre-study phase, presenting our one month’s work in 10 minutes. A number of important decisions were made over this month. A few decisions have spilled over and must be decided over the next few days. These decisions were based on data collected and analyzed over the last month from various sources. The aim was to decide based on data, and to back up every decision with data and numbers.

Next we enter the design phase. After the major systems have been decided, we get into going deeper into the systems and designing them. The design phase ends before Christmas, and then starts the manufacturing phase.