Category: Team Status Reports

Class time this week was devoted to the final presentations. We were happy with our presentation and have adapted it to show at the final demo.

Out of class this week, we worked on full integration of the software and on completing our tests. The tests caught a bug in the legality checker that can be easily corrected. We had issues with the software integration that should be corrected tomorrow, or other workarounds will be found. We also added electrical tape to the bottom of the chess pieces, adding friction to improve playability.

The schedule remains the same, not that there’s much room to change anything.

This week, we worked on full integration of everything from the hardware through to the software and the website.

The most significant risks to the project at this point is that something in the board hardware becomes damaged. We purchased spare components, so barring a few pieces, we would be able to swap in a new component. Another risk is magnets damaging pieces. While this is extremely unlikely, the solution to this would be 3D printing a replacement. This could be done very quickly.

No real changes were made to the design and we have not rescoped the project at all, so our schedule remains the same.

This week in class was spent printing out the acrylic for the top of the chess board. After spending some time working on the acrylic, we now have a completed hardware device!

That means the rest of the work is divided into Patrick’s and Ryan’s sections where our team is working on brushing up the software. Our last piece of software before we finish is to connect the Raspberry Pi to everything else and send data on the moves that are being played to the user account. Currently, Patrick is finishing up the code to map each move, and Ryan is working on a new setup (an alternative to the REST API) that can more efficiently send moves!

We are currently a little behind of where we wanted to be, but should have plenty of time to catch up over Thanksgiving break!

This week, we had the interim demo. Vikram and Patrick were able to show off the sensing functionality of the board and firmware, and demonstrated that it can accurately detect the presence of a white piece, black piece, or no piece on each square. Ryan demo’d the account creation, game creation, and game PGN export features of the website.

The upcoming weeks will involve integration with the RPi and the machining of the final board surface and pieces. Our largest risk is that the remaining integration takes longer than anticipated. We are almost a week behind our initial schedule, which leaves us with one week of slack time remaining. We will be making up some time by running some hardware tests in parallel with integration work. As long as integration is not extremely difficult, we should get it done with time remaining for user testing.

We are not making any changes to our requirements or our design this week.

This week, we spent the entire time preparing the hardware, firmware, and website for the interim demo.

The most significant risks to the project as of now are that integration takes too long and that we cannot meet a certain goal we set for ourselves. The issue of time is managed by the fact that we have two weeks of planned slack time. We also can run tests like power consumption while the board is not perfectly accurate.

As of now, no changes have been made to our requirements, our design, or our schedule. If we experience a few days of delay in progress, then we will likely end up using some of our two weeks of slack time.

Below is a picture of the computer correctly seeing pieces on the board (N is no piece, B is a black piece, and W is a white piece).

This week Patrick spent time researching how to access data from the board (interfacing the board with the RPi), Vikram spent time soldering and checking that the components of the PCB board were as expected, and Ryan spent time fixing bugs on PGN export notation and setting a basic theme for the website. All in all, things are ready to be implemented and are on track for the end of the semester, but more readily, on track for the midsemester demo.

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.

This week, we worked on validating our sensing architecture as well as the chess board PCB schematics and layout. We also worked on incorporating Stockfish’s move generation into our legality checker.

The biggest risks that our project faces are 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. One contingency plan is that we can have a list of drop in replacements for certain PCB components. Another risk is that something is done incorrectly on the circuit boards. This risk is being managed by having all group members look over the design before ordering. We likely 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.

One change we wanted to make to our requirements is going from simply being able to detect piece color to detecting each piece type using the hall effect sensors. This was initially considered as a change because the initial color detection is not enough to cover all scenarios of pawn promotion. Before we finalize this change, we will do more investigation into magnet choices to ensure this is possible. The cost of this is that we will spend a little more money buying components that may not be on the final product. This cost will be mitigated by saving extra money on PCB components where possible.

We are largely still on track with our original schedule.

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!