Module 1: Software and Applications

Finishline

Finishline is our in house project management website, developed by our software team. The Mechanical and Electrical teams both use Finishline to track timelines, propose project changes, schedule design reviews and submit reimbursement requests for any purchases made for the club.

Finishline is where your task list and deadlines will be tracked, so understanding how to navigate it is paramount.

Your first task is to go to FinishLine and log in with your @husky.neu.edu email address. Then navigate to the teams tab. Once you have found your team, message the project head on Slack, and ask to be added to the team on Finishline as a member.

Deliverable: Message Head on Slack to Request to be added to the team

Open

Next, click on a project that you are interested in under that team, i.e. suspension, and click the tasks tab on the top of the page. This page exists for every project, and will be the location of any tasks you are assigned.

Open

Your next task is to navigate to the Gantt tab. From there, you will navigate to Ergonomics and find the pedal box project. Then hover over the manufacturing work package, and find the end date. Write this date as the completion date on your Google Doc.

Deliverable: Note completion date of pedal box project on your google doc

Feel free to take a look around Finishline to acquaint yourself with the other functionality, however if you need to use the other features later on, your head can provide this information.

Confluence

If you got to this here without logging into confluence, props to you, you lil fucking wizard.

Confluence is a software we use to document and store information about the design of our cars, and the function of our club. This section is a little bit less about the software itself, and moreso about why it is so important.

When building a racecar, every single decision that you make needs to be justified with bulletproof and often times numerical reasoning. Otherwise, you are engineering with emotion, which is a great way to waste time and money. These justifications are then presented to judges at the end of the year. Their judgement of the quality of our decision making accounts for a large portion of the points we score at competition. Thus, keeping track of these decisions is critical to go back and explain to the judges why we did what we did.

So, any time you make a design decision in the club, you better make damn sure that it is written down in a confluence page that is located in the correct folder.

Deliverable: Locate your subteams folder under the NER24 page. Find the list of leads and write their names and roles down on your google doc.

Solidworks and PDM

To start the creation of your brake pedal, you will need to download Solidworks and install PDM correctly.

For those who don’t know yet, Solidworks is a Computer Aided Design, or CAD, Software. This provides a lot of functionality, however the main is that we can quickly and accurately mock up models of our parts, and insert them into assemblies to see how they interact with other parts in a system.

PDM is the cloud file management system that we use to collaboratively edit files. PDM allows you to check out and check in files, to ensure that there is only one person making permanent changes to a file at once. We will cover more on this later on in Module 3.

To install solidworks, follow the COE instructions on this page COE SolidWorks Student Engineering Kit Download - Northeastern University College of Engineering

Once you have done that, navigate to this page https://nerdocs.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AQAd and follow the instructions to download and install PDM.

Deliverable: Once you have installed both Solidworks and PDM, message the Chief Mechanical Engineer to grant you an account on PDM.

HSMWORKS Ultimate

HSMWorks Ultimate is a plug in for Solidworks that allows us to generate toolpathing for our CNC machines. Without it, we can only machine things manually, which is far less functional for creating complex geometries.

To download HSMWorks, you first need to create an Autodesk Account and verify that you are a student. To do so, navigate to this page and follow the instructions. Autodesk Education | Students and Educators | Install Assigned Products

Once you have a student account, click your profile in the top right, then under account, click products and services. Then at the top right, click add products. Scroll down to HSMWorks Ultimate and select. Under Student, click access products and follow the websites instructions to install. It may require you to download Autodesks launcher, but that should come with your download.

Deliverable: Have HSMWorks downloaded and installed.