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Israel’s Status Report For 12.9.23

Tasks completed

Completed installing the components on board and proceeded on testing, Finalized communication and integration with Hang for Advice polling and sending game state.  Troubleshooted Arduino code as well as photo resistors for each of the segments in our board, integrating buttons into the board.

Progress status

Made large progress as I needed to start fresh on board development 9×9. Became behind schedule and still slightly so as I expected to have the board perfected by Thursday.

Tasks to complete

Finalize the testing of our board: tweaking the threshold values and perfecting the game state interpretation. Also in the process of redeploying some components as short circuiting as made them faulty.

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Israel’s status report 11.12.23

Tasks completed

I have completed making the interior board lifter that we plan to have support our vector boards to be close to the board. We had laser cutted the acrylic board and the H wood supporter. In addition, I tested the optimal resistor choice to use in series with the photoresistor in hand given the holes we have on the board.

Progress status

Even though I have developed the foundation to support the vector board and circuitry, the photo resistors will not be able to get a correct consistent value for all wholes as it can not be stationary in the hole. I will need to add spacing into the board itself to support the photo resistors to be in the holes and be all consistent.

Tasks to complete

I need to finalize the internal layout of the board to support the vector boards near the top panel of the board. Because I need to have different constant resistors for our photo resistors. In addition, I need to make holes into the board so the photo resistors can fit into the wood panel. I also need to add holes for the buttons to be placed into the board itself.

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Team Status Report For 11.11.23

A hardware risk we have is being able to solder all the vector boards in a timely fashion. Even with the components we have, we are still waiting on more sensors and resistors to be received. Due to this long wait, we will have Hang develop vector board soldering to speed the process once the parts arrive.

 

A software risk is the integration between the hardware and software. Currently the board hasn’t been finished, so there’s no way of testing the communication between the board and the web application. To mitigate this risk, Hang will spend some time helping Israel with the construction of the physical board.

 

No changes were made to the existing designs of the hardware, software, or go engine.

Here is our current updated schedule:

11.11.23 schedule

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Israels status report 8.29.2023

Tasks completed

I have finished the laser cutting for our board as well as software expected for our initial circuitry. I finished troubleshooting and testing a small section of our circutry for our light sensors and have order new parts for us.

Progress status

Even though I have tested our circuitry at a smaller scale, I need to repeat a similar process for different light sensors. This means I am falling slightly behind but I can at least start on the LED portions.

Tasks to complete

I need to finalize the internal layout of the board to support the vector boards near the top panel of the board. In addition, I need to adjust the software for this new light sensor we are using but that should be a quick task. In addition, I may start on integration or LED addition task for the time I wait for light sensors to arrive.

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Team Status Report For 10.28.23

One of the risks that we are handling in the hardware development of the project is starting mid-size scale development of the circuitry without having tested a subset of the circuitry design. Some concerns regarding this is that our Arduino component, even though theoretically able to provide enough Current for our required sensor subset read time, the Current the Arduino has may not be substantial enough to provide for all the sensors at once. If this Arduino can not provide Current required, we will need to add more into our circuit than expected to limit current usage of each sensor.

 

For the secondary risk mentioned in last week’s team status report, we were able to find an open-source database with expert Go games; this fully mitigates this risk from last week. The games are stored in a file format called SGF, or smart game format, where game moves are stored in a tree which allows for variations from the main line of gameplay. This database has over 60000 go games, and the go games are split into different categories.

For hardware, we have changed our usage of photodiode sensors to photo resistors with an additional static 1MOhm resistor in series. This decision was required due to unexpected value results not being a high enough range. This along with the component requiring an additional resistor to restrict Supply Current made our usage of this sensor impractical and even more expensive than other components. The new photo resistors are very simplistic in characteristic, cheaper, and will theoretically be able to provide a larger range of light values with our 1MOhm resistor we have chosen in series. In addition, we have added more parts to the physical board design, as we will require an additional platform in the physical board to support the multiple mini vectors to be held near the top of the board’s holes.

 

Besides the hardware design change, there are no design changes to the reinforcement learning side and the software side. The development of the reinforcement learning model is ahead of schedule. The development of the software side is a little behind schedule, but the work can easily be caught up in time.

Updated schedule:

Physical board assembled and subcircuit testing breadboarded.

General vector board placement internal view

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Israel’s status report 10.21.23

ABET

Some new tools I have already learned has been laser cutting for wood board making. I also planned autocad designing which is a skill I had to refresh myself in. I plan on learning more about arduino coding with COM port communication as I have worked more with stm32 processors and UART initally.

Tasks completed

I have received supplies for our team and have started on laser cutting our board for our project. In addition, I have worked on protyping the hardware: starting a subset of the hardware sensors to see the value adjustment and the circuitry testing.

Progress status

I have made good progress in terms of the embedded software but do still need to test everything and ensure it is prepared for communication with PC soon. I am on track but would like to be further ahead given the hiccup with our hardware board making initially.

Tasks to complete

I will need to make the final order of electronics Monday and start putting all the electronic components together. In addition, I will need to add electric insulation to the board and methods of holding the circuit boards into the board so that mobility of the board will not affect the circuit board placement note cause for errors in future. I’m addition

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Team Status Report For 10.7.23

The major risk that we are taking as of the moment is spending more time on the implementation of the board than expected. With less support from Techspark than initially expected, it has led us to focus on building a board of our own. To ensure this does not put use behind schedule, we plan to dedicate more time next week in catching up. If the Board implementation does require more time to build, which is not planned nor expected, we will be sure to look for external resources that may help us build the physical board if not look for possible substitutes to making a custom board.

We currently have no changes in our design other than our shift of projects from the earlier week.

Schedule update:

One principle of engineering that was used is modularity. One specific example in the site design would be the code for visualizing the go boards. Go boards are typically 19×19, but the code is made modular such that it can visualize up to any NxN board size. We attempted to make our code as modular as possible because modularity typically reduces complexity and makes parts more reusable.

In addition, we have used skills from Electrical Engineering and electro-magnetic physic principles when deciding on components to use as many components have limitations. Such principles applied would be Ohm’s law and KCL rules for our simple circuitry design as well as knowledge on components characteristics.

With the custom board development, one of the concerns we dealt with as an engineer was dimension requirements and constraints of our box that would hold our electronics. This board development required skills in product engineering to make sure the board was easy for users to use as well as safe for users.

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Israel’s Status Report 10.7.23

Tasks accomplished

This week, I made not the most progress as I’d like in the embedded software aspect of things. I have ordered half of the parts but due to some fall backs on  wood shop, I prioritized more of my time with the physical board implementation more than anything.

I made a autocad and solidworks design with the help of a tech spark technician for laser cutting and marking the top of the board as required. I have also made a overall model of the board itself for documentation purposes and for helping when board building is of need.

(autocad inital design in a dwg format)

Progress status

Because I prioritized more of my time with board building, I am slightly behind on embedded software for data retrieval trials.  I am still on track as I should have time for such elements next week from front loading these initial physical board tasks.

Tasks to complete

I will need to prioritize data retrieval trial code next week. In addition, if I could get parts early parts, it would be ideal to make the board in class time just to ensure we have the board ready for our return from fall break. This is a additional task not intended as we expected to techspark to provide more support with building the board. This, again, should not be a challenging task with our cad designs and required designs for laser cutting.

 

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Israel’s Status Report 9.30.23

Tasks accomplished

For this week I have worked on looking for parts for implementing the hardware design required for our new critera added. I made a sketch of the mux placement for grabbing data from the sensors

I also looked into Arduino serial protocols that would be beneficial for communicating data. This video on CSV collection was fairly helpful as well as this webpage for sending data to the Arduino mid run. I have also finalized the new schedule for our team and worked on presentation preparation for our design.

Progress status

I did fall slightly behind as my role in the project has changed overall but I was able to quickly adapt and do my research in part in time before it hindered the team in any way.

Tasks to complete

I will need to order parts ASAP to test and will need to order all the parts just as soon to ensure that we can build the entire board early and ensure we have enough time for testing purposes.

Abet

When developing our design, I learned more of logical expression and equations when trying to analyze and address many of the components on and off states. These conditional states were learned in 18-240 as well as in some of my research in gate simplification last Spring under Mchenzie.

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Israel’s Status Report for 9.23.2023

Tasks accomplished

I have started the ramp up for Java Script and React usage with informational videos. Some of these videos from Mosh Hamedani (Older but more thorough use of react 1) (Newer tutorial on how to use react 2). I followed these videos aswell to practice using React in preparation. I have also looked into documentation for java-script itself with Mozilla with helpful functional usage.

In addition, I looked for some UI based libraries and packages to use with React that might be helpful. One of the ones of focus is BluePrint due to its very well-made documentation and customization integrated with CSS that might prove beneficial in the future with my prior experience with CSS. Other ones of interest that might be used are as followed:

Progress status

Finished ramping up on Javascript and and React usage for this weeks plan.

Tasks to complete

I plan to quick overview on CSS just to be more familiar with the format as well as HTML in case it proves useful in the future.

Websocket familiarity is a number one prioity for my interface with backend. I plan to ramp up on websocket usage and knowledge way more.

In Addition, I plan to start designing the Mancala frontend basic pages and components. Initially start making a interface and blueprint of planned functions and pages. I plan to use my framework from my learning rampup aswell for my codebase.

If everything turns out well and plans don’t stray off, I plan to have a codebase, all my TODOs and file locations, organized for implementation to start smoothly .