ENEL400 Individual Reflection
Student: Minh Duy Nguyen
ID: 10161107
Due Date: April 13, 2018
Date: 2018-04-13
Course: ENEL 400
Team name: Group 11
Team members: Yuqing Zhao, Minh Nguyen, Edward Gu, Martin Bobek, Dylan Hofer, Rahul Saha
Instructor: Dr. Denis Onen
TA’s: Diego Coelho, Mahmood Noweir, Sina Rezai
1.Introduction
This paper describes my experiences with my group for the Smart Door prototype. I was the hardware manager for this project. First, teamwork reflection will be mainly about how each team member contribute to the success of the project, How the strengths of each team members were identified and used, how my team overcome adversity or conflict. I will also emphasis on member’s participation, team workload and what skills we have learned or improved after we finished this project. Next, through out document I will comment on how my group performed through out the semester and how we implemented the design process for this project from the hardware manager point of view. Finally, I will demonstrate How this projects help me understand the field of engineering.
2. Reflection on teamwork
I am writing this document as a guideline for first year student, after taking part of many design teams I believe I can share some good tips and lesion that I learned. As a first year, you, reader, you are not as experienced with working in a team. From the perspective of a hardware manager I am focusing on hardware manager’s task. In my point of view, there are a few things you should keep in mind when you join any group.
An effective team is a team that has members who is willing to be adaptable. Everyone has a different opinion, idea, characteristics and set of experience that they bring to the table,
No two persons are alike. Therefore, a good teammate is the one that understands this and learns to be flexible in order to reduce conflict as well as meet the needs and learn to accept ideas that are different from his. At the end of the day, the whole entire team are working toward the same goal. Moreover, a good team understand the importance of clear communication. It will not only affect the work quality of the whole entire project but also help to keep a strong mental connection between partners to partners. Next, In a world where people only care about the final result, a good team should have vision. They should never forget what is their goals and what are coming up. By losing vision, a group can lose track of their project easily.
Second, in order to be a good team player, each member need to keep a few things in mind. First of all, be reliable and responsible, an excellent leader will know what is his role and what he need to do. If anything happens he should be able to address the problems and a solution to it. Being reliable will not only reduce pressure on other teammate but will also help to motivate them to work harder. Next, a good team member must show commitment, Team players are genuinely committed to their cause. Good team players will make sure they are always there when needed, but great team players will make room for extra time and contribute as much as possible even when it is not their responsibility. Even for the best group in the world, they sometime have to face difficulty situation; For example, they might experience conflict between team members. Knowing how to deal with these kind of situation are equally important.
When a team reaches the point when there are healthy differences of opinion, resolving conflict requires respect and patience. The three-stage process below is a process that I took when I need to solve any argument. Step one; prepare for resolution, team leads need to start with identifying the conflict, then discuss then impact of that to the team from workload to mentally issues. Step two; fully understand the situation, clarify the reason why there were disagreement is the first step but then you need to know what causes, when and why that happens in order to fully be fair to all teammates. Step 3 three; reach an agreement, being in team everyone need to be fully awarded of what happened and contribute a solution to solve it. A good team will avoid giving punishment to their teammate if this happen. When conflict is resolved take time to acknowledge the contributions everyone made toward reaching a solution. This can build team bonding and confidence in their problem solving skills, and can help avert further conflict.
Last but not least, to be a good leader, first be a good follower. A great follower knows how to "peruse" their co-worker, collaborators, clients, and different gatherings of people. They comprehend what persuades them and what upsets them, abilities that they can utilize when they move toward becoming a leader. As a follower, you have the opportunity to develop yourself as a leader of the future. This might be through observing the strengths and weaknesses of your leader, or through the support, advice and development opportunities that they give you. Many of the skills and attributes you develop as an effective follower are mirrored in an effective leader.
A letter to myself
Dear Maxi,
This is Minh your internal friend. I am writing this letter to show you how to be a good teammate, I have just enough experience from all of the struggled I have been though after three years in engineering school to tell you what you should do and what you could have done better. By being an ideal teammate, you need to be mindful of people that you are working with. You need to be really really responsible for what you need to be done. Just keep in mind that other people works are depended on yours. You will also have to work with people that does not have the same knowledge background as you, they might or might not understand what you said but do not worry I will show you how to communicate with them. I have three main points for you when you want to be in any team.
First, time management is very important, you might think this is not related to being a good teammate but it will heavily affect your performant in a team. For example, if you are being late to a team meeting frequently, it just shows how much less effort you are putting in the project compare to your teammate. If you have a task that you need to do by Monday, for example, please start working on it around the Tuesday before. This will not only give you more time to edit and find your mistake but also help you avoid work overloading. Next, being mindful of all of the deadline are equally important. You need to write down all of the important days and give yourself some room before the deadline days, i.e. 2-3 days. This will help you know what you need to focus on first, which task is more important compare to other tasks. Moreover, you might find yourself in the situation when you have to do two to three tasks at the same time, organization is key when it comes to these problems.
Next, know your abilities, we are just a normal human being we have our strengths and weakness. I know you think that you can do everything with your effort but trust me that is not healthy for your team workload. You need to identify your skills and focus on it. You should not take roles that you do not have much experiences or do not know much about. If you have no other choice but so, please first let your teammates know about that. Doing so will help them know what to expect from you and how much help they should provide you. When you find yourself struggling with any task, you should have your teammate to help you. They can provide a different prospective and help you solve that problem. You also need to workhand; If you want other people to put in work and energy, you have to do it yourself first.
Last but now least, be mindful of your teammates. As I promised I am telling you how to deal with conflict as well as how to treat your teammates right. Although how much you try to avoid disagreement in your team, it may happen between you or your teammates to other members. First, you need to make sure you are fully informed; start asking question to guarantee that there is no miss communication. You must not assume anything when it come to conflict management. Always be polite when you asking question; try to talk slow and calm because it will help your group understand you better. You can try to come up with a solution to the argument but if you can not reach the agreement, you should seek for external help. Have the group sitting down and decide what to do; or talk to people with higher order than you for example your instructor, your favorite TA.
Good luck with your life decision and make sure you keep these advices in mind when you decide to do anything.
I hope this help,
Your other self,
Minh Duy Nguyen
3. Reflection on design
This will be written as advice to you from a hardware manager viewpoint and go trough the main tasks that I have gone through this semester and other project that I have been doing.
Most engineering plans can be innovations gadgets or frameworks that are made by human exertion and did not exist previously or are upgrades over existing gadgets or frameworks. Creations, or plans, don't just show up from no where. They are the consequence of uniting advances to address human issues or to take care of issues. A plan is the aftereffect of somebody endeavoring to complete an errand all the more rapidly or effectively. Plan movement happens over some stretch of time and requires a well ordered approach. This process is called engineering design. In order to be a good engineer you need to be extremely careful when it come to design rules.
One of the main issues that must be understood in a design process is the way to furnish architects with the capacity to decide the ease of use results of their plan choices. We require design rules, which are rules an engineer can follow so as to expand the convenience of the possible project. Breaking the rules is thought to be irresponsible and could cause the whole entered project to fail. Sadly, most new designers do not know about these and tend to do thing that they are not allowed to; particularly the ones they ought to never break. For example, when a team design a PCB there are many important rule that they need to keep in mind, i.e. the spacing between component, the width of any trace. By not following these principles, the final product can be an outwardly jolting plan. When ordering any product after the design process it is very hard to tell if it will be working properly or not, therefore your best bet is to follow these rules that you put for your own project. In additional, project demonstration skill will be driving your intended interest group to lose confide in your capacity or skill. By having poor illustrations, potential clients can see your image as unworthy of their support. That implies you won't get paid.
In this project, we designed a prototype for a smart door device. We started the design process by spending sometime brainstorming, then we decided on how to do it. We also needed to design hardware for this project. We attached IR detectors and servos, a buzzer, and hall effect sensors. Each piece of hardware also required a resistor to connect it to the PCB pin. Through this project we learnt many design rules and skills. For example, the use of unit tests, we were able to fine tune parts of our code, such as, buzzer and LED operation, sensor sensitivity, and driving servo. On the day of the demonstration, our door worked perfectly. Overall, we worked effectively as a group, engaging in strong communication, and developing well thought out code. This project taught us the value of effective time management. We also learnt the importance of team working.
One of the things we learned from this project was applying the principles of agile programming in developing well structured and efficient code. We also learned how to work better in a team while also gaining better time management skills. Another practice that we found useful was to regularly upload PCB files to some sort of version control. Since Circuitmaker often has confusing and conflicting error messages, we found that it was better to keep back up versions of our files in order to deal with fewer errors at a time. This is an effective way to ensure that we do not lose everything.
The additional design features coupled with the code formed a significant chunk of our design solution. Due to extreme testing we can conclude that our system is fully functioning and fulling all of the requirement. Nevertheless, a demo of our prototype was conducted in April, and an impressive result was achieved.
Another letter for me
Hello Maxi,
This is Minh your friend. I am writing this letter to show you how to be a better and more effective hardware designer in the future. After my experience with AEM and ENEL400 project I can tell how and what to do when you are responsible for hardware. There are three main things that you always have to keep in mind.
First, use all of your resources. You might or might not have the background knowledge for a specific task but you do have the ability to learn and adapt to new information. At this point you still do not know where to start when you have a new project. Start with Doing your research well; ask other people; class mate, your instructor, TAs, lab tech, people who know so much more from you; experiences and well ask academic. You can look most thing up online nowadays however do not let that create a bad habit in you. Comparing to elder generation, you just have access to internet you do not know how thing works if you do not do more research. Moreover, be careful when you take information from untrusted resources. Unlike your professor who you can trust to receive knowledge, Internet is a dangerous place; anyone can come and put faulty information so just do not trust everything you see.
Second, be responsible, you need to know how important is your work and how much it will affect your group if you do not do it right. As a hardware designer you need to know what is your goal as well as what is the project requirement. Your work will directly impact the software portion of the project so if possible pay extra attention to small detail such as the pin numbers, resistor values and the size of any components on the board. In additional, make sure you have a clear communication with the other team since even though they are not a part of the hardware team but they will be using the product after you design it. Doing PCB design can be very stressful and tedious so have at least one of your teammate look over your design to make sure that you make no mistakes. Even if when you did something wrong, own up to your mistake and find a solution to fix it. Finally, you should attend to any meeting held by other parts of the team to make sure that you deliver products that meets their demand.
Last but not least, think out of the box. There are tons of possibility out there, if you are stuck with any problems, try some thing else, try to take a different approach to the problem. If you aim at the same target everyone else is aiming at, your shots will end up where everyone else’s do. If you till the same soil that everyone else tills, plant the same seeds they plant, and use the same water, you’ll get the same garden. My point is that the minute you introduce a goal in your thinking, you’re introducing a constraint. Your mind now has a direction, and it will tend to go in that direction. This is why so many businesses offer help to come up with new ideas, new designs. They can do that because they don’t carry the burden of constraints on their thinking.
Good luck with your life decision and make sure you keep these advices in mind when you decide to do anything.
I hope this help,
Your other self,
Minh Duy Nguyen