Month: April 2019

We made significant strides this past week in both the physical product and integration.  Austin finished assembling the physical sensor array with muxes, Chris finished getting the signal handling to a working state, and David was able to integrate the software game with the hardware inputs and play a simplified game to checkmate.  Remaining goals for this week are for Austin to get the physical enclosure put together (so it’s possible to actually put a piece on the board instead of just balancing it on top of an individual sensor), for Chris to get the smart clock integrated, for David to finish ironing out wrinkles in the integration of the game software with the board, and for Chris and David to try and see if they can get the networked component operational.

We got the basic board working with my code, and I was able to play a minimal singleplayer game between stockfish and I.

I’m roughly up-to-date with my schedule. Most of the core is integrated and in place for a working singleplayer game, modulo some TODOs: and special cases that I may have overlooked. The GUI is pretty barebones and could have some debug output moved to it instead the console.

The biggest deliverable this week are the final presentations, and poster. Other than that I hope to get to the final TODOs I left in my code like en passante capture and castling.

This week, I finished assembling the sensor array, with the muxing fully enabled.  I also soldered the rgb led strips into the appropriate configuration, and made a circuit to account for the voltage difference between the power source and the voltage demand of the LEDs.  I am now working on making the physical board surface that will cover the lights, and expect to finish that in this upcoming week.  In addition, I have started and will continue to work on the slides for the final presentation this upcoming week.

Personal Progress

Austin and I were able to finish the sensor circuitry and test it. We were able to get it working for the demo. We are currently trying to help finish the gui software by learning python chess.

Schedule

We are behind schedule but I think if we work hard all week, we should have a finished board and software before the demo.

Deliverable

The main focus is definitely the software. We are trying to get it to a state where we can link the sensor input to the gui for basic gameplay.

Personal Progress

Integration is coming along with the sensor code and the QT framework. I spent most of Friday running through a few different implementations for all test code and real sensor code. I’ve been able to simplify the design quite a bit and integrate Chris’s test code. This is proving to be an exercise is dusting off my python and software engineering skills, which is useful.

Schedule

We are on track to be ready for our demo barring any surprises.

Deliverable

Hopefully we will have have our code fully interacting with the sensors and driving the LED’s by Monday.

 

This week, I worked on finishing the physical board.  I finished soldering all 64 squares, with only 4 squares being messed up (I soldered a total of 68).  I am now working on putting the squares together into the cohesive board for the demo.  Chris is helping me with the lights since I’m currently the slow point of the project.  Progress is going fairly well, and I’m hoping to be done with the board by the time of the demo on Monday.

Risks

The biggest risk is that integration doesn’t go well. We are making very good progress on all our major components. The squares are ready and being assembled on the board, the gui is coming along well, and the led’s are very close to being set up. There might be issues that we might not be aware of because we were working on components in isolation. Luckily, we have a clear division of responsibilities for all the components, so we should be able to isolate issues and resolve them quickly.

Changes to System

None

Changes to Schedule

None

Personal Progress

I’ve been working on the led’s and the smart clock. I was able to run some simple test programs on both devices. We will have the led’s working for the demo but the smart clock might still be a work in progress. This is ok because the smart clock isn’t essential to the game overall. It will be ready for the final demo. I also finished the code for reading the data from the sensors and passed it off to David so that he can integrate into the gui for gameplay.

Schedule

I am on track to be ready for our demo next week. The sensor code is ready, as well as the led’s so we should be good.

Deliverable

By next week I hope to have the smart clock working and a solid plan for how to network the two pi’s.

Chris and David are mostly caught up with the planned progress, and are readying the integration of their respective components right now.  Austin has now fallen behind with the individual squares, but has cleared out the remains of this week of other work and is ready to spend significant amounts of time finishing the squares off.  The goal is for him to finish assembling the physical board by Thursday-ish so that the team can integrate the rest of the pieces together and begin usability testing.  This week will definitely involve more work than previous weeks, particularly by Austin to make up for falling behind schedule.

Personal Progress

I’ve been looking at how we want to use the 7-segment display for the smart clock portion of the project. I have a good idea of how to connect the display to pi, and run a basic clock program. However, the complexity in the functionality comes mainly from how the clock will be triggered and stopped based on the game play. We want the clock to start as soon as the other player sets down their piece and stops their turn, and for it to stop when the player puts down their piece, signaling the end of their turn. There are still some design decisions that need to be finalized on the core game logic, and this will determine how and when the smart clock will be called. I am currently working with David on integrating the sensor software with the core game logic, and I will also be working on getting the 7-segment display connected to the pi to run basic programs so that we can integrate it quickly when the core game logic is finalized.

Schedule

We will have the integration of core game logic and sensor software done by this Friday, and the smart clock functionality done by the weekend. I hope to start looking at the connected pi feature for remote play over the weekend as well.

Deliverable

We will complete integration of core game logic and sensor software, and the smart clock done by the end of the week. We will have a solid plan for connecting the pi’s as well.