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Team Status Report for 9/28

This week, we primarily focused on our design presentation. We refined our design, moving away from a wired FPGA implementation to a wireless approach. To accomplish this, we plan to use Raspberry Pi 0’s for each of the displays (one per player, plus a main display) to communicate with the primary RPi, which will handle most of the computation. MQTT and HTTP Rest APIs are the two primary approaches we are currently considering, with the former being our current planned approach.

A was written by Jolie Wasserman, B was written by Cody Breidenbach and C was written by Denis Lucey.

Part A:

It may seem like our project doesn’t directly deal with public health and welfare, but there are subtle benefits involved. First off, Scrabble is an intellectually stimulating game, so taking away the administrative tasks of the game allows players to focus more heavily on their strategy and lexiconal prowess. By adding hint capability to Scrabble, it enables novice players to have an enjoyable game experience, encouraging them to play more often, which ultimately acts as a positive impact on mind stimulation. Novice players will also feel less anxiety towards the game with the hint capability as they will be less embarrassed of their word choices compared to a more experienced opponent. Finally, each player gets their own individual touch display, so there isn’t any cross contamination of germs compared to using a main touch display. 

 

Part B:

Our social considerations included the social experience of a group of people spending time with each other while playing a board game. While web app approaches are certainly simpler while achieving the same functionality, we believe there is inherent communal value involved with the in-person Scrabble experience. Hence, we have sought to capture the convenient aspects of playing Scrabble online (word validation, automatic score tracking) while maintaining the personal aspect of the physical game. However, we have not identified significant political issues or other social concerns.

 

Part C:

Our project has a few economic considerations, especially considering how it may help new players get exposed to the game of Scrabble. Our solution as proposed would be a good companion piece to both new and experienced players, whether it’s providing new players with guardrails or allowing more experienced players to check their words against our suggestions. Because our solution will be relatively inexpensive, these groups will not be priced out. Addressing the production and distribution, because all of our components are widely produced, there are no concerns about parts being unavailable, making it easily consumable by users.

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Denis’s Status Report for 9/28

This week I spent some time looking into the different FPGAs that we could use for our designs. Then, after discussing with my group, we pivoted to a design without the FPGA. We all agreed that using RPi0s would enable us to do wireless communication between the main RPi and the individual screens. We also agreed that it would be easier to drive the video screens if they each had their own individual RPi driving them, as opposed to one FPGA driving all 4 screens. After changing our design, I began looking into appropriate video screens that would be able to connect to the RPi0s.

This upcoming week, I want to finalize which screens we will be using and place the order of the RPi0 wireless and the screens, so that I can start working on the wireless communication.

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Jolie’s Status Report for 9/28

Throughout the course of this week, I delved deeper into the understanding of finding the best possible scrabble words given the state of the board and the player’s hand. I found an article by Andrew Appel and Guy Jacobson (from CMU SCS) written in 1988 where they implemented such algorithm. Here they used a DAWG (directed acyclic word-graph) to keep track of valid words and easily search for possible words. I plan on implementing a similar algorithm but also include functionality for searching from the anchor square looking right (the article only included an explanation of searching from left of an anchor square). An anchor square is defined as an empty square adjacent (horizontally or vertical) from a filled square. Additionally, I learned how to “cross check” newly placed letters. If a word is being placed horizontally, the cross checking occurs vertically on each newly placed tile. Each empty tile on the board is assigned a list of letters that can be placed there given the letters already placed near them. When a tile is placed, we check to see if it’s in the cross check list. If not, the move is not valid. This makes the search for possible new words shorter by taking out all references to invalid cross-check letters. Next week, I will continue to look into this method and start modularizing the algorithm.

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Cody Status Report for 9/28

This week I spent some time looking to wireless communication options, since we recently modified our planned design. I have mostly been researching HTTP Rest API and MQTT as the two primary options for wireless communication. Mosquitto and Paho MQTT are the two libraries I’ve identified as useful, as MQTT is currently our first option. This week, I will be giving our design presentation and will continue to set up the software infrastructure for the project.

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Jolie’s Status Report for 9/21

This week I gave the Proposal presentation for my team on Monday 9/16. Most of my weekend before the presentation was spent fixing up the presentation and practicing my delivery. Also, began looking into the most efficient algorithms for hint word generation. One way would be to make a tree-like structure and traverse through the tree with the words in the player’s rack and the words on the board. To make the problem more manageable, I will break it down to only thinking about words that can go horizontally and then tackle the vertical direction. I looked through the ECE Inventory list and requested a camera for our project based on our needs for resolution. Next week, I will continue to look into word generation algorithms for hint logic and possibly start the code if I find an algorithm that I deem is the best way out there.

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Cody’s Status Report for 9/21

I began setting up the codebase for the project. This included creating the github repo and infrastructure for the main file. Additionally, I found a csv of valid Scrabble words and added the code necessary to parse this csv and store them in the internal hashmap to be used in validation. SImilarly, I created the map of letters to scores. I also began looking into the Python libraries necessary to take and process images (cv2) as well as letter recognition (pytesseract). Specifically, I expect functions like image_to_string, image_to_boxes, and image_to_data to be useful. Next week, I will begin figuring out how to implement these methods to achieve basic functionality for taking images and recognizing individual letters. However, most of my focus will likely be figuring out basic modularity of the CV controller and game state.

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Denis’s Status Report for 9/21/24

This week I began looking at the possible options for the FPGA and the LCD screens. By next week I want to create a doc with some of the tradeoffs of our options so that we can decide which hardware we want to use for our project. Looking at the purchasing sheets there are a few FPGA options and we will likely have to choose one of those options given our budget constraints. Another big question is what LCD screens we will choose to use. I need to learn how other similar projects have interfaced between an FPGA and a touch screen, as well as what hardware they used. I think that my other major task for this week will be starting and working as a team to make our design presentation, filling in the slides for what work I’m going to be doing. All in all, I think that we are on schedule but these next few weeks will be critical to the success of our project, in particular ironing out all of the technical details, and starting to take the first steps.

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Team Status Report for 9/21

We changed our existing design from a centralized dealing mechanism to users inputting the tiles they are dealt. This way, we only need one camera for board observation. Also, we then mitigate the risk of incorrect letter recognition because we can check that new tiles recognized on the board were indeed in the player’s rack. Before, we were relying on two instances of letter recognition by our computer vision. Now, we have a method for increasing our confidence that the letter recognition was correct.

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Introduction and Project Summary

Scrabbletron addresses the tedious nature of playing a game of Scrabble. Whether it’s checking if a word is allowed or not, or tallying up scores and making sure you don’t miss any of the bonuses, the administrative parts of Scrabble take away from the fun.

Scrabbletron performs word verification on new words placed onto the board in addition to scorekeeping for all players. If a player is stuck, we offer hints based off the current state of the board and the letters on the individual’s rack.