Resources

Resources are a broad category of anything you can use.  We will restrict this Resources page to providing wisdom to this and any project. Our background has been in software engineering and the parallels to mechanical, electrical, and other engineering disciplines is obvious. An example? One that comes to mind is the "Separation of Concerns" in a design. 

Separation of Concerns

This concept is really a sub-concept of da Vinci's  "Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication."  The idea is to keep design elements as separate from each other as feasible.  This allows for each element to vary independently of any others when change happens, usually due to technology change.  When things are separate, the change is usually made much simpler, cheaper than if bundled together. Of course, the world is a trade-off and separation of concerns needs to be tempered with other considerations such as cost, time, probability of change, competency of builder, etc. (Although often most of those criteria are made more favourable by applying this principal.)   

A mechanical example of this principal is a bicycle hub motor where the electric motor forms the hub of the integrated wheel. Like many design considerations, to use a hub motor can be good or bad depending on your requirements. First the good. Hub motors are simpler because they eliminate the chains and sprockets required. They are not so good in wet or dusty conditions because the motor is more exposed. If cost is a consideration in your requirements (and if you are reading this, I would guess it is), hub motors are at least 3 times the price of a more conventional separate motor and wheel design. If you wish to carry more cargo in the future (human or other) you can vary the power of a separate motor and/or controller cheaper than buying a new hub motor.  What if we vary the wheel? If for some reason, you want a bigger drive wheel (maybe more ground clearance) a bigger rear wheel is cheaper than a bigger hub motor/wheel combination.  Or, let's stretch the principle a bit more. If you might use the motor in another application altogether (eg. a water pump, an E-bicycle conversion) you will likely have an easier conversion and find more parts with the separate motor approach.  Again, it all depends on your requirements. And, of course, always consider the probability of a future need against the certainty of current need. 

A technique used to analyze what elements in a design need to be separated is Truth Tables.