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18XT System Integration

While my first three years on the Hopkins Baja team gave me of experience with the hands-on aspects of design, manufacturing, and testing, being team captain gave me a chance to make infrastructural improvements that would long outlast my time on the team. I took what I had learned as drivetrain lead as well as my internships and created the following tools that the team has used extensively.

18XT Gantt

In order to effectively manage and prioritize tasks, I created a custom Gantt chart in google sheets. We had previously tried to use other Gantt softwares, but none had the amount fo flexibility and customization that we wanted. I created a sheet for each subteam where every component on the car was broken into the required tasks and assigned ownership. I also made a high-level component summary page and a daily task tracker, which pulls all active tasks that should be worked on for the selected day.

18XT Design Factor Determination

In the past, the team has created design factors based only on the previous years’ design factor and whether or not that component failed. This underinformed decision making has lead to overbuilt parts and doesn’t properly prevent parts from failing. Additionally, design factors had not been comparable across vehicle systems, so a value of 1.4 for a drivetrain component had a very different meaning than a 1.4 for a suspension component. In order to create a robust design factor system, I made a spreadsheet that accounted for the most critical considerations and weighted all components against eachother. Using this new system, any component on the vehicle can be compared to any other and the design factors continue to be refined as more data is added each year.

Drivetrain Goals Index

I created a goals index for each subsystem after seeing how discontinous the goal setting had been between subsystems previously. The following spreadsheet is the drivetrain goal index, where each component has goals set in various categories. Organizing the susbystem goals in this way ensures that all components are working towards reaching the overall subsystem goals and each component designer has quantifiable, achievable targets to aim for.

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