Category: Team Status Reports

We gave our design presentation this week and started working with some of the hardware we plan to use, namely the Raspberry Pi. We found out the camera is not compatible with the RPi 5, so we switched to the RPi 4, which should be sufficient. Outside of setting up some of the dependencies and cloning the git repo onto the Pi, we also began familiarizing ourselves with the software libraries we plan to use, but we are open to changes based on the feedback we receive from our design presentation.

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.

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.