This week we had our design presentation. We received some interesting questions, fortunately none that made us seriously question our decisions. We look forward to receiving the peer review feedback.
We decided to increase the size of the squares on the board to 2 inches, to allow the battery holders to fit better on the underside of the PCBs. This size increase means the PCBs will cost an additional $30, which is not a concern as we are still safely under-budget. The pieces we sourced will be just a bit small for the board, which should be no problem. We also decided that our MVP will be simply detecting white or black pieces, as before. We will leave the ability to differentiate between knights, bishops, rooks and queens for pawn promotion as a stretch goal. For now, we will simply assume that all promotions are to queens (this will cover the vast majority of situations anyway). We also received feedback during the design presentation regarding ways to determine the identity of the promoted piece in software, which we are considering.
The biggest risks that our project faces are still part shipping time and part stock. We are managing these issues by doing schematics and picking parts early as well as by monitoring stock of any components that are low. We are also looking at alternative vendors that may have more stock. We should order the PCBs next week, and our contingency plan if they take a long time to arrive is to get a head start working on the physical board in the meantime. Another risk we identified previously is that something is done incorrectly on the circuit boards. We have been managing this risk, as Vikram shares his progress on the schematic and layout with Patrick and Ryan. We still believe we will have enough money left over to order a second revision if absolutely necessary, but the circuit boards themselves should have room to rework and modify the design.
There have been no changes to the schedule.
