Team B0: Seamless Autonotator

Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone Fall 2022: Vikram Marmer, Patrick Joyce, Ryan Guan

Month: September 2022

Team Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : ryg500 Team Status Reports

Overall, the majority of this week was centered on creating, editing, and designing the proposal presentation. The remaining time this week centered on basic setup. Patrick and Vikram worked to create a smaller buy list from a variety of magnet options (and started looking into various PCB’s for the board itself). Ryan started some basic library and tooling work on the software side.

The biggest risk that our current project currently faces are potential issues with part supply. We are attempting to combat this by ordering from reputable vendors, ordering extra product (Ex. 70 magnets instead of 64 incase of broken or faulty magnets), and finally carefully placing the order (this is to ensure that our team is able to retrieve the correct magnets on the first order rather than having to wait for subsequent orders).

All in all, while our team might not have incurred substantive physical process, we were able to prepare ourselves to make more efficient project in the following weeks (library tooling, shopping list… etc.). Be prepared for more to come!

Ryan’s Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : ryg500 Ryan's Status Reports

While the bulk of this week was spent working on project presentations, I was able to make some progress on creating object oriented classes to model the chess board. I was able to set up our Github and will work on integrating it with Vikram and Patrick as we move into the next week.

While it may feel that substantive work was not completed, we are still completely on schedule. Our schedule allotted time during the earlier weeks of the semester to account for the proposal and design presentations (and therefore had a lighter workload) as well as waiting for parts to ship, while delaying much of the heavier workload into the latter half of the semester so that progress could be accomplished more efficiently. That is to say that I, as well as our team, am still on schedule.

Furthermore, next week, I will focus on creating some baseline libraries that will streamline the process of determining whether Python is an optimal tool (in latency terms) for the website backend. This will help achieve the deliverable of creating object oriented classes (our first software deliverable) as well as accomplish small setup tasks that will help Patrick and I write better software to accompany Vikrams hardware. Next week we plan to discuss the best tasks for Vikram and Patrick as we wait for our parts to arrive.

Patrick’s Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : pjoyce Patrick's Status Reports

Class time this week was entirely devoted to the proposal presentations. I’m thankful for the questions I received after the presentation, as they got us to think about areas of the project that we had overlooked and solutions we hadn’t considered. Outside of class, I created a short list of options for magnets that would fit in our chess pieces and weren’t too expensive.

I tried to find options that cover a large range of magnetic field strengths (about 2000 to 15000 surface Gauss), so that we can buy some from different ends of the range to test the sensing before committing. I worked with Vikram to narrow down this list to 3 different magnets, based on what we think will work best with the hall effect sensors he found. I have also been working on the legal move generation algorithm and notation list, and I hope to finish it next week. This puts me slightly behind schedule, as I had hoped to finish legal move generation this week. However, I have plenty of time to finish it by Wednesday and so shouldn’t have a problem getting back on schedule, with the legal move generation and legality check program done by next weekend.

Vikram’s Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : vtm500 Vikram's Status Reports

We spent the first part of the week working on the proposal presentation which was given on Monday. After this, I started finalizing our hall effect sensor options. At this point, I plan to order two ratiometric sensors to test. One is a unipolar sensor that would be able to detect different strengths of magnets. This would be useful for our original idea to put different magnets in differently colored chess pieces. The second sensor is a bipolar sensor. This sensor allow us to use the same magnet, but flip it inside the chess piece to distinguish between piece color. This strategy was suggested by Professor Mukherjee during our presentation, and we are going add this to our initial test setup. As part of the sensor choice, I collaborated with Patrick since he had found a variety of magnets of different strengths and sizes.

I also started designing a 2 square test PCB to validate our plan for sensing pieces and figure out any additional considerations we may need to deal with.

My progress is slightly behind schedule since I would have liked to have had the magnets and sensors ordered at the end of this past week. However, this will be mitigated by parallelizing work on the final circuit board with testing of the sensors. Design on the final board that is not directly involved with the sensors can still be done. In addition more work on the board mechanical side can be done.

For the next week, I hope to have started testing the sensors and magnets we will purchase. In addition, I will have started schematics for the main chess board PCB.

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