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.
