Category: Ryan’s Status Reports

This week I focused on providing a front end and finishing up linking Patricks code with my code! We tested sending moves and a variety of stress tests that allowed us to see the entirety of the project in full! We debugged some issues that occurred with Vikram’s hardware, practiced the demonstration, and filmed some of the video so that we would be prepared come the demo Monday.

We are on track to finish the project! We just need to touch up some aesthetics and ensure that the project is transportable. This was a wonderful semester, thank you to the course staff!

This week I focused on cleaning up parts of the website and publishing the website online. On Sunday Patrick Vikram and I will group up to put the final touches on the project and wrap up testing. The project is coming together and is looking complete!

This week I prioritized working on using the Raspberry Pi to communicate with the website. While originally I planned to use a REST API to have the Pi communicate with the board, I found that the optimal solution was to create two sets of user accounts on the website. The first set of user accounts would be regular user accounts, and the second set of user accounts would be “Pi” accounts, with each Pi account uniquely corresponding to a board. From that, the user accounts can register a Pi account to tie their board to their user account. Finally, this setup will allow the pi to connect with the user account (and therefore can send moves to the website).

All in all, we are a little bit behind where wanted to be this week, but Thanksgiving break will give us ample opportunity to catch up!

This week I focused on working on a HTML and CSS scheme to make my website more pleasing to look at. While I acknowledge that this part of the project is not that important functionally, it is important from the point of view of the demo and the presentation. It is important that the project looks as polished as it is functionally sound. Other than that, I will work on matching up with Patrick to complete some Pi work next week.

While we are slightly behind on testing, this is nothing to be worried about as we can quickly catch up on this work next week!

This week I focused on preparing for the project demos that are to come next week. There were a couple concessions we had to make in order to build our MVP by the project demos. The first concession that we had to make was to acknowledge that we were going to be unable to pair the chessboard with the website before the project demos. Nevertheless, the chessboard and the ability to sense piece movement as well as the website will be completed individually before the project demos.

The website is mostly functional, but at times is buggy (and sometimes missing pieces). As a result, my goal this week was to round out the rough corners of the website (fixing bugs, looking the website look semi-polished, and finishing exportation). As a result then, my website is ready to be seen for the demo!

We are on track to finish the entire project on time, and I will use the additional time to put finishing touches on the website (and possibly deploy it, although the environment of the final demo will determine this).

Coming back from fall break, I was able to work productively on sending PGN notation to chess.com. Since there was a bug that was found previously, most of this weeks work was focused on fixing the transportation of notation from the website to chess.com. Furthermore, I need to find a good way to ensure that the user has an account for chess.com logged in (and this way can ensure that we are not making unnecessary requests to chess.com). Other than that, I focused on applying a theme to the website, but need to come up with better design details in the coming weeks. Finally, I will focus on integrating my design with Patrick’s interface next week (and the coming weeks) to prepare for the demo on 11/7.

We are on track! I will not need additional time or help to finish my side of the project. Next week during class I will focus on soldering and working on the physical board with Vikram and Patrick!

This week was fall break, and no substantive work was completed during this week.

While this may sound disheartening to hear at first, I am still on track to complete my portion of the project at the designated deadlines. This is due to the fact that we had already planned for the time lost during fall break. My project still is on track to be completed well before the end of the end of the semester (official deadline at the end of the semester) and include two weeks for integrating my software with Patrick and Vikram’s code. In the coming week, I will demonstrate the ability of my software to receive arbitrary notation (currently from an input text file) and the ability of my software to send code to chess.com. Furthermore, my website now has the ability to individualize users (login and password).

The time in class this week was spent peer reviewing team presentations. While we weren’t able to see the results of the peer review, we saw some good feedback on the hardware of our design. We will be further testing the possibilities with the chess pieces and what we can do to optimize accuracy with the chess pieces.

With regard to my progress for the week, I was able to catch up (from my illness last week) and create a rudimentary website that can take arbitrary notation. One small flaw that I found to be true over my progress (but should communicate with Byron and Alex) is that there is a need for a secondary notation legality check in the web app (following the reception of data in the API). This is to prevent users from sending flawed data to the website as well as allowing the check for errors.

All in all, I am currently still working on adapting the results of Patricks notation into chess notation (caught some bugs from my implementation last week) and should be able to have a demo ready by the end of next week! At that point, the majority of the software work will be done on optimizing the backend of the website for the database.

I am currently on track to complete the project in time, this week was quite productive!

While the majority of this week was spent drafting up slides for the design presentation, I was able to spend some time designing and testing the latency for notation.

Fortunately, since the legality checker is done in C++, that section’s latency requirements were easily satisfied. On the other hand, while python is a much slower, interpreted language, the latency requirements for uploading to the website are much more lax, and as a result, the python string parsing and upload times still fit within the 2 second window outlined at the beginning. The only latency left is the

Unfortunately, I have fallen a little behind with some of the basic website work and want to catch up next week. I spent much of this week sick with an unbearable sore throat and cough. I am only now getting better and should be able to attend class, participate in team meetings, and contribute more actively. My next week is much more free and will allow me to make significant progress catching up to the work that my teammates have done.

Next week, I want to finalize the frontend of the website, and be able to add new games, delete old games, and upload chess moves (notation to the website). I also will be communicating actively with Patrick to work out some of the interfaces that my code has with his legality checker.

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.