Hi,
for a lot of student teams, the coming weeks are filled with exciting events. Our team also spent the last year to improve our locomotive, built a lot of new systems and integrate everything.
But before that, we would like to talk about the last year. Even though our initial expectations were a little more humble, we had a lot of success with our newly built locomotive ADLER2. We won the European competition and got second place at the English competition for our first appearance there. Of course we proudly presented Aisler, as a lot of our electronics depended on their generous support.
While the weeks leading up to and during the competitions were of course quite stressful, the period afterwards is often times littered with exams. Success is short-lived.
Therefore, parts of the team came up with a great idea - a PCB memorabilia in form of a coin, powered by Aisler.
It makes for good reminder of the teams’ effort and achievements.
Furthermore, the coin initiated a shift for the tool selection of our PCB design. Before, we designed with different softwares, all of them very expensive when not used as a student.
But based on the experience, we decided to completely pivot to KiCAD. Especially with the release of version 10 at the start of the year, it has become very convenient and covers all requirements we have and assumably the requirements of most student teams.