Purpose
Lecture 1 framed hardware design around C-SWAP, short for cost, size, weight, and power. This note records that framing.
The constraints
Cost mostly comes down to whether the device is consumable or reusable, since a consumable has to be cheap enough to throw away.
Size and weight are in many cases driven by power, because batteries tie stored energy to mass and volume.
Power decides how long the device runs between charges, and it also sets the thermal budget, since everything the device draws it eventually dissipates as heat. The lecture’s rule of thumb was that 10 mW/cm^3 of dissipation raises device temperature about 2 degrees C.
Power draw comes from three key sources: sensing, computing, and communication. Knowing which one dominates tells you where to optimize.