Team B0: Seamless Autonotator

Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone Fall 2022: Vikram Marmer, Patrick Joyce, Ryan Guan

Weekly Status Reports

Ryan’s Status Report for 10/8
Posted by : ryg500 Ryan's Status Reports

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!

Team Status Report for 10/1
Posted by : vtm500 Team Status Reports

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.

Patrick’s Status Report for 10/1
Posted by : pjoyce Patrick's Status Reports

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.

Vikram’s Status Report for 10/1
Posted by : vtm500 Vikram's Status Reports

This week, I first designed and milled out a test PCB for our hall effect sensors. While waiting for the sensors to arrive, I began working on the schematics and layout for the actual chess board PCB. Schematics are nearly done, and layout has been started. While designing the chess board PCB, I began looking at costs. To lower costs, we will create the board from 8 duplicates of the same PCB that is large enough for one column or row of the chess board.

Once the sensors and test magnets arrived, I soldered the sensors to the test PCB and worked with Patrick to verify that our magnet choices will work for this design. We found that the diameter of the magnet mattered more than expected in comparison to the strength of the magnet. The results mean that our plan for sensing the color of the pieces will work well, but sensing piece type in addition to color may not work with our initial magnet choices. However, physically larger magnets (not necessarily stronger) are available.

Given this progress, I am back on schedule. However, I do have a large chunk of work set for the next week, so I will have to plan well in order to not start falling behind.

For the next week, I plan to have the chess board PCB and the BOM ready to order.

Ryan’s Status Report for 10/1/2022
Posted by : ryg500 Ryan's Status Reports

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.

Team Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : ryg500 Team Status Reports

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!

Ryan’s Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : ryg500 Ryan's Status Reports

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.

Patrick’s Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : pjoyce Patrick's Status Reports

Class time this week was entirely devoted to the proposal presentations. I’m thankful for the questions I received after the presentation, as they got us to think about areas of the project that we had overlooked and solutions we hadn’t considered. Outside of class, I created a short list of options for magnets that would fit in our chess pieces and weren’t too expensive.

I tried to find options that cover a large range of magnetic field strengths (about 2000 to 15000 surface Gauss), so that we can buy some from different ends of the range to test the sensing before committing. I worked with Vikram to narrow down this list to 3 different magnets, based on what we think will work best with the hall effect sensors he found. I have also been working on the legal move generation algorithm and notation list, and I hope to finish it next week. This puts me slightly behind schedule, as I had hoped to finish legal move generation this week. However, I have plenty of time to finish it by Wednesday and so shouldn’t have a problem getting back on schedule, with the legal move generation and legality check program done by next weekend.

Vikram’s Status Report for 9/24
Posted by : vtm500 Vikram's Status Reports

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.

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