Required Documentation

Owned by Jack Christensen
Apr 18, 2022
2 min read

It is your responsibility to ensure that your project is fully documented and available to the team. Development and documentation for all electrical projects should be tracked in Git and hosted on GitHub (under the team organization, github.com/waterloo-rocketry). If you manage your repository using issues and pull requests, and if decisions regarding these are made in Slack conversations, put a permalink to the conversation in the issue comment (this is to help traceability). In general, how you manage your project repository is up to you. Project documentation should include the following:

Design Documentation

  • A document outlining the major decisions made for your project. There are two purposes for this: first, so that future generations maintaining your project know the reasoning behind your decisions; second, because writeup on all systems is required in the IREC report. The following information is needed for the report, but feel free to add any other documentation that you think will be helpful.

    • Description of the system’s purpose 

    • Relevant design constraints and criteria 

    • Block diagrams (and other diagrams, if you’d like)

    • Description of the system’s functionality 

    • Description of the relevant design decisions/tradeoffs involved in developing the system

    • Descriptions of any analysis/testing performed on the system

User’s Guide / Checklist

  • Step-by-step operating instructions.

  • Assume that you will not be there when your system is used.

Schematics & Board Layout

  • Any circuit you build should be thoroughly documented in a schematic. Schematics should be correct, clear, and well-organized. The primary purpose of a schematic is to communicate the circuit to someone who hasn’t seen it before. A messy schematic will make your circuit harder to review.

  • Some guidelines can be found under “Schematics and PCB Design” in the Learning Resources section

  • The components in your schematics should match what you intend to use in the circuit. If you are using a particular component, label it as such (and provide a datasheet). This will help identify potential issues in design reviews.

  • Provide both the PDFs and original files for final schematics and PCBs.