Beginners Guide

How to start getting involved

Everyone

Review the rules for this years competition. (Note that the team does a lot more than just the competition, but this gives us an excuse for the direction we'll be taking a lot of our projects).
Make a github.com account and have a look at our main repository .
- The issues tab is where all of our team-management and official communications take place. Filter by labels. such as the field you are interested in, "good for beginners", and "type:Problem-statement" for brainstorming but non-technical tasks.
- Feel free to come up with your own ideas for issues and tasks, or even to post an issue just to ask a question. If you're confused about something, then chances are someone else is too and it would be helpful to have those questions and answers documented.

Take some time to get familiar with Python syntax if you are not already. The majority of our work is done on linux systems.
- There are always work-arounds for other OS's, but I can't guarantee that they'll work or that I'll be able to help you if you run into problems.
- If you are new, the easiest way to get started with a development environment is to create a linux virtual machine with vagrant. Go ahead and download it. Install it yourself if you can, come to the next meeting with problems if you run into any. alternatives to pt 2: dual-boot, suffering, etc.
Get familiar with git.
Download and install Vagrant for your OS
- You will also need Cygwin and git bash if you are on windows.

Install EagleCAD
Get familiar with git. It's not a standard tool for CAD drawings, but it can version control anything and it would be useful for maintenance and collaboration on complex models and assemblies and files, even if it can't handle diffs as gracefully as it does with text files.