Earlier this week, I decided on using Stockfish’s legal move generation and spent time reading through the Stockfish source code and understanding the interactions of different structures and functions. I worked on incorporating their move generation into my legality check program, and will continue on this next week. Also, I decided to store moves as piece source and destination squares in the legality check to easily interface with Stockfish. The current plan is for Ryan’s database/web code to translate these to notation. This leaves me on schedule for the legality check and firmware development.
Our test batch of magnets and sensors arrived on Thursday, and I tested them with Vikram today. We tested 7 different types of magnets with the bimodal hall-effect sensor. The resulting output voltages are shown in this table.
The bimodal sensor outputs 5V for a high strength magnet. As you can see in the chart, our highest strength magnet only resulted in a 3.4V output. We learned that our calculations for magnetic field strength at a small distance from the surface gauss and the height of the magnet were above the real quantities. From this, we know we have to find some stronger/larger magnets to buy if we want to distinguish between piece types. We should have an order in for those by Tuesday, and can do some preliminary tests with them inside the chess pieces next weekend.
