“Hurray!!!” the team exclaimed after our Preliminary Design Review (PDR), as our audience stood in awe, and exclaimed CRShiled!

We had an exciting week wrapping up our Preliminary Design Review with the engineers and liaisons at Raytheon, and the experience felt like a whirlwind of insight and inspiration.

In just a few short hours we had got a glimpse into the broader RTX family of companies, compared their global product lines to our own project trajectory, and then got a behind‑the‑scenes tour of Raytheon’s testing facilities—where we saw firsthand how equipment is put through rigorous tests such as temperature cycling, vibration, and environmental emulation to prove it can survive the harshest field conditions.

The engineers praised the structure of our presentation and our roadmap, noting that our work of building on an existing system closely mirrors their own engineering reality and emphasizing the critical importance of documenting every change for long‑term reliability. This is something that resonated with us, and reinforced the impact that this experience will have on us as professionals.

This week not only validated our progress but also gave us a concrete glimpse of what it feels like to operate as engineers in a real‑world, high‑stakes environment. We will take the advice to heart as we move forward and approach our next big milestone, prototype inspection day.

Wow, everything has moved so fast. Weeks of professional training, doing research, writing documentation, and communicating with our sponsor has gotten us to our first formal piece of documentation – our PDR.

This week we had our mock PDR presentation.

We had the opportunity to present our PDR draft to our colleagues and coaches, and faculty, and received constructive feedback on our findings, presentation skills, and included material.

It was a very insightful experience, and we received great suggestions from our audience, including questions that helped us understand our the gap between our knowledge and our audiences. We realized that we have to frame our complex problem in a more digestible way, and at a higher level.

This presentation has served as an amazing practice run before our official presentation to the Raytheon team next week. The team is now in the process of revising our PDR and slide show to make sure they reflect the same intentions, based on the suggestions we were given, and some new additions that will make our solution more robust.

Overall, this has been a very informative week, and we’ll continue to prepare until before we have to go down to Largo to meet our sponsor. We decided to celebrate as a team to keep the moral high!

That’s it for us, see you next week! Shields up!

This week we had the opportunity to attend the FPL white belt lean six sigma training!

The workshop introduced us to Lean Six Sigma concepts and showed how structured problem-solving can be used to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and strengthen decision-making.

We will be using these concepts to improve our development strategies.

We decided to make some changes to team roles.

We will rotate the roles of meeting facilitator and scribe, to redistribute the load of work evenly and allow everyone an equal opportunity to take initiative in meetings and technical conversations.

The goal is to make sure everyone get the opportunity to lead, and display their skills.

That is all for now. Next week we’ll finalize our PDR draft, getting us one step closer to our implementation!

Sigma Shields sign out!

It’s official, we are CRShield!

We chose this name because it encompasses the our primary goals: protecting our codebase from detrimental vulnerabilities by detecting them before deployment; preventing cyber attacks on company infrastructure.

Our CRS platform will defend our codebase!

This week we presented our team logo and name to our liaisons and coach, and they approved of our design.

As a team, we are aligned in this mission to harness these CRSs, and to use LLMs to harness their true over traditional tooling.

Keep those shields up!

We are excited to start working with our sponsor Raytheon and our IPPD coach. This week we got to learn about our projects details and were the past team left off.

We were able to schedule our meetings with our coach and liaisons, and got a debrief about the next steps and goals for the rest of the year.

Our liaisons shared some of their vast knowledge with us and were excited to set us up in the right direction.

We still have much to discuss as we await for the source code, and delegate tasks or each team member. As of now we have broken down our main roles in respects to the administrative side of things, but well share that next week once its finalized.

We are so excited to see what we can accomplish together, and learn more from industry specialist! Go Gators!