Each phase of engineering is crucial to the development of projects, throughout the phases one component has become more popular within the industry. Environmental concerns have become a large part of today’s society. Whenever something is built on a large or small scale the effects on the environment must be accounted for in order to ensure safety for the planet and its inhabitants. Many times the large scale manufacturing heavily pollutes to local ecosystems. To stop this, manufacturers are slowly adapting to semi-sustainable factories and some have spent the mass amounts of money to create fully sustainable factories. While manufacturers should aim to be environmentally friendly, the designers of the project should do the same. Engineering projects not only should be developed in a way that is safe to the environment, but should also continue to be safe for the environment when they are deemed completed and used in the as intended. A good example of this are the hybrid and electric cars. These cars are being made to have a cleaner impact on the environment. While hybrid vehicles use part electric and part gasoline to drive, electric cars run solely on electricity. This dependence on electricity is much cleaner and is widely available where gasoline is becoming harder to find. Overall, the sustainability factor of engineering a project is a key factor for the long-term investment. EcoFriendly devices are generally more expensive at startup, however, after using them for a few years will become cheaper than a standard non-EcoFriendly device.

Standards were used to initially guide design documentation because they were information on technology that were known to work. With the aid of standards, design on various technology was sped up drastically. As a result of technological standards being documented, the design and building of devices began to be documented as well. With documentation of standards becoming more and more popular, the documentation of a project became more detailed. These documentations became important knowledge banks where one could refer to a read in order to easily redo or improve the project within a faster amount of time.

Standards:

• Rules of Settlers of Catan – we will carefully adapt the official rules from the game into our automated board game.
• Coin Size – the tokens to represent the resources will be built to a standard poker chip size.
• ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) Plastic – the 3D printer here works best with this standard form of printing plastic.
• 9V Battery – standard power source for electronics
• Resistors – used standard resistor values and colors
• DC Motors – will use the standard stepper and servo motors
• Voltage into Arduino will be a standard value of 5V
• Probability – we will implement a program to simulate rolling two dice with a 1/6 chance to roll any number on a six-sided die
• Size of Pieces – the game pieces will follow the precedent from the official settlers of Catan game
• Buttons – we will incorporate standard buttons to activate the automated board game.
• Switches – we will use switches to adjust the dispersion of the resources
• LEDs – use a standard 2V across each LED