Status Report
Austin Milford-Rosales
My primary goal at the front end of this week was to finish the hardware sections of the slides and effectively communicate that knowledge to Chris (our presenter) to make sure that the presentation came out well. After starting work on them last Saturday, I continued on Sunday, making the block diagram in powerpoint (since my hand drawings are pretty bad and revising slides to communicate our goals more effectively.
In addition, we spent a fair amount of time working on finishing the definition of our project. The previous week, Professor Mai had suggested adding in some FPGA acceleration of portions of a chess AI. We held a prolonged team meeting sunday before we did our final edit run of the slides to determine the feasibility of that addition, and ended up deciding against implementing any FPGA component in the project.
After our presentations, I began doing some work on the design document, and reviewing some of my previous calculations. Our first parts arrived, and I have laid out the kinds of tests I want to conduct with the hall effect sensors and began gathering materials (acrylic and wood of various thicknesses) to use when testing the parts. In addition, I found a physics major friend of mine before the parts had arrived and went over my calculations with him, and I found a slight error. Although the magnets we purchased will work, they will only be able to create fields within half of the range that the sensors can detect. If the sensors are not very precise, then this will cause additional problems, and we will have to order another round of magnets to test before getting all the pieces. I hope to have that determined by Sunday evening.
In addition, after our presentation, another member of the class approached us and mentioned he’d worked on a similar project for another class, and that he only detected the presence of pieces, but not which kinds of pieces were on which squares. He then had the users affirm that the starting game state was accurate, and kept track of all piece placements in software. We are currently debating whether or not to switch to this approach in our group, and although it would make things much easier, I am a bit concerned it would decrease the complexity of the project a bit too much. My ability to get the magnet sensors working appropriately over the next week will definitely play a role in our whether or not we switch our approach to this aspect of the project.