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Group Status Report for 10/31

Risks

  • Our own team deadline of November 23rd, when Tony and Danié meet for the construction of the board, is approaching and we still do not have demoable components. We are addressing this by making sure to keep in touch with each other so that no one falls behind.

Changes

  • We may have to consider using a different microcontroller due to the complexity of the calculations we need to make, but if this is necessary it’s a simple re-tuning.

Schedule

  • Minor changes to the schedule, rearranging tasks.
  • A snapshot of our schedule can be viewed here.

Progress Pictures

  • Dimensions for board after verifying the actual travel distance of our linear actuators.

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Danié’s Status Report for 10/31

This week I paused work for the circuitry of the piece detection as I realized I needed to get the ball rolling on materials for the construction of the board asap. While I wait for stuff being ordered or made, I will continue to work on the circuitry. Specifically, I touched based with Tony and we made some new design desicions based on what we both have at the moment. We discussed the construction of the board top as well as constraints we must keep in mind when we put our subsystems together, and I have spent this week researching a bit more and preparing for putting orders in towards the construction of the board.

No updates to my schedule as of last week in terms of pushing anything back, but rather rearranging my tasks in order to pipeline them.

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Brandon’s Status Update for 10/31

This week, I worked primarily on getting user authentication and registration working for the web app. I originally wanted to work on communicating to an arduino through the website through SerialPort, but was not able to work on that in depth, so that will be my top priority for the next week. I am slightly behind schedule, although still have a decent amount of slack, so I hope I will be able to work more this next week and get back on track.

 

login:

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Brandon’s Status Update for 10/24

This week, I worked on using socket.io to add 2-player chess and I also added bootstrap to make the website look a little prettier. I underestimated how much work both the design report and working with socket.io would take, so I did not get to start working with SerialPort / getting input from an Arduino yet.

Below are some images of my progress.

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Group Status Update for 10/24

Risks

  • Currently, one of our members has been MIA for weeks. He is tasked with the piece movement subsystem of the project and we are not entirely apprised of his progress, we only know he has been attempting to keep track of the linear actuators he ordered, but no further details on his progress. As time passes, the risk that the piece movement subsystem will not be complete becomes higher, and thus, to mitigate this risk, we will soon have to decide whether to cut this part from the project and proceed without him or not. If we were to do this, we would devise some way of informing the user where they need to manually move the opponent’s pieces to.

Changes

  • Our design is mostly the same, with the changes detailed in our Design Review. The overall design remains the same, but the details of implementation for some parts have changed. In summary, they are:
    • Now modifying existing chess pieces instead of 3D-printing our own
    • Using magnets to orient the pieces on the board correctly
    • Smaller board size to accommodate the length of affordable linear actuators.

Schedule

  • A snapshot of our schedule can be viewed here.

Progress Pictures

  • Multiplexer Testing Circuit:

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Danié’s Status Update for 10/24

This week I have been working on the detection circuit since the multiplexer arrived. I am able to loop through the inputs and will soon scale it to use all 16 inputs, adjusting the resolution as needed. Once the 16-piece detection circuit is working on the breadboard, I will begin construction of the board top or construction of the pieces, depending on when the pieces ordered from Amazon arrived. I mention wooden pieces because, as of our design revision, we will now be modifying wooden chess pieces instead of 3D printing our own.

Below is an image of the arduino console detecting input from 3 “pieces”, where 14 and 15 were set to GND and 16 was set to an arbitrary voltage <5V:

I am behind our original schedule but proceeding well into the adjusted schedule.

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Brandon’s Status Update for 10/17

This week, I mostly worked on getting the socket.io library to work with the webapp and preparing for the Design Review. While the sockets are not completely functional at the moment, I am hoping to get it working by early next week, and then working on SerialPort for the remainder of the week.

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Group status update for 10/10

Current risks:
  • Unforeseen delays due to the state of the world right now (re:pandemic) and due to us all being apart from each other have caused some shifts in the order we tackle the tasks we scheduled out, and there may be other delays to come that we cannot predict. We’re managing this by making better efforts to stay coordinated and in-sync as a team, so that if something happens to one of us, we can quickly adjust the project in response.
Changes:
  • We’ve switched from the actuator we initially were going to procure to a cheaper one. This one does not come assembled, so that is added time spent on the project, but it should be simple to build and saves us around $200. This actuator, however, has a smaller travel distance, and will result in a smaller board. As a result, the pieces will have to be made smaller than usual chess pieces, but having normal-sized pieces was a preference we had, not a strict requirement. We chose to have more freedom and flexibility in our budget over having bigger pieces.

 

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Danié’s Status Update for 10/10

This week, I’ve procured everything necessary for the detector circuit minus a multiplexer. While I wait for that to arrive through the mail, I’ve been learning how to use the Dremel DigiLab 3D Slicer software to model our own pieces and print them in TechSpark. This is a simple circuit diagram of the detector circuit:

So far I’m still on schedule, and by next week I hope to have both the 3D printed pieces and a functioning prototype circuit.

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Brandon’s Status Update for 10/10

This week, I learned how to use node js and express, including using libraries with them. I was able to use chessjs and chessboardjs to make a working chess game which also prints information about the game’s status as shown at the bottom, so I am on track of schedule.  I hope to get the game working with sockets for next week.