Throughout the course of the wireless thermal sensor project there were a lot of lessons learned for the team. Most of these lessons learned dealt with budget management, time management, and designing for failure modes.

Our project required us to use quite a few fairly expensive electronic devices. Since we were building a multi-nodal system we needed to buy multiple components to populate each node we built. When a node broke, these components were lost to us as they were very difficult to remove and re-use without damaging them. As the project went on, more and more money was spent on items such as these, so maintaining an accurate budget became extremely important. Towards the end of the project we had to make some important decisions about what we could afford to purchase and how many nodes we could feasibly build. Everyone on the team learned some valuable lessons about sticking to a budget and modifying the budget when the project requires.

Our project schedule was different than the other capstone teams because of the X-Jet testing at NASA Ames over our spring break. This meant that we had to have a complete working system tested before spring break. To accomplish this, we had to factor in the time for board fabrication and shipping, and then population at the U of I.When the first board didn't work as expected, the schedule had to be adjusted to repeat the process. Communication between team members became essential during this time to ensure that work was progressing on schedule and that components were ordered soon enough to receive them and use them.

The VAST flight that the team participated in provided some valuable lessons learned. First of all, when integrating with a seperate team for a future test, communication became vital we so that we would know the size and weight we were allowed on the flight. Also, when we did our DFMEA we focused mainly on how our device could fail, but we didn't take into account any problems that the balloon would have that would affect our devices. Unfortunately, when the balloon didn't fly exactly as expected, our device was left at the landing site until the batteries died and this caused us to lose our data. It was a good lesson learned that external forces could cause device failure, and this should be taken into account in the design of the device.