Author: amilford

This week, I have worked on making the physical board.  I fixed an issue with the power supply for the LEDs and replaced 2 rows of LEDs that were fried due to the initially wrong power supply.  I also designed and laser cut the chessboard, and have been working on combining the sensor array, LEDs, and board into one single hardware component.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week, I was a bit thrown off by losing Sunday night and all of Monday to a surprise ER trip.  Thankfully, nothing serious came of it, and I spent time making more of the squares I need to make for the game board.  It is a purely time intensive process, so I have been working on clearing out schedule time and suspending non-essential activities to make sure I can make enough to have the board up by the end of the week.  In addition, I have begun working on the code for the lights, and spent some time working with a smaller led strip I already owned after the booth opened during carnival. I am thankfully done with all my non-capstone obligations for the semester, and will be working much more this upcoming week to catch up.

This week, I helped Chris with getting the mux logic working and started making squares for the chess board.  After some initial error, I figured out an effective system for making the squares and settled in and cranked out a couple.  My speed in making them has increased pretty quickly over the course of the ones I’ve made, and I’m optimistic I can keep cranking them out at a good pace over the course of next week and especially the week after, when I won’t be building booth as well.  Separately, I have been reading the Colwell readings and will have the section finished and summarized by tomorrow night.

I discovered later last weekend that I ordered surface-mount muxes instead of breadboard-mount muxes, and that the breadboard-mount muxes are actually significantly cheaper.  Since our parts orders go in on Tuesday and Thursday, I went ahead and waited until class on Monday to talk with Anthony to make sure I didn’t mess up a parts order again. As a result, I am still behind on the full muxing.  However, I was able to get the appropriate capacitors from the 18-500 lab, and went ahead and made a circuit with multiple wired sensors at appropriate distances so that the magnets wouldn’t trigger the further sensors. I then wired them all through the ADC (which takes 4 inputs) and Chris was able to read across them from the pi.

I was really hoping the order would make it by Friday so I could spend the weekend soldering some of our actual squares that will go under the board, but it did not make it in before the weekend.  I previously put in an order on the same website with the same shipping option that arrived on Thursday, so I didn’t choose to go up, but I saw on the news that a mercury spill temporarily shut down a USPS shipping location in Pittsburgh, so I’m assuming that’s what caused the delivery to take longer this time.  Since our demo slot is Wednesday, I am hopeful that maybe I will be able to get them Monday or Tuesday and add in muxing and/or actual soldered components by the demo. In addition, I’ve been attempting to design some basic LED functionality that will not be representative of the actual LEDs we use in the final project, but should be able to show a proof of concept by the demo.

Austin Milford-Rosales

Status Report 5

 

This week, I intended to get multiple squares working together and begin the process of integrating them into the sensor board.  Chris and I were able to integrate the ADC and then read data through to the Pi. However, I messed up and got surface-mount muxes instead of breadboard mounted ones, which meant when they arrived and I wanted to get a partial board assembly on the breadboard, we were unable to do so.  Our ADC can handle up to 4 different inputs, so from that angle, we can do a very limited demo, but otherwise we will have to wait until the replacement part order can arrive to actually continue with implementation. This is putting us behind now, and I’m going to have to have to drop in some solid hours in next week to make up for this delay.  Fortunately, I just took my last test (before the final) in one class and just wrapped up a project in another, so I will have more time than normal next week to work on catching this part up.

Austin Milford-Rosales

Week 4

This week, I ended up spending a decent amount of time finishing work on the design review document.  However, my primary goal was to test the functionality of the sensors and to try and develop the circuit for an individual square.  The datasheet had two separate suggested designs that either involved a single capacitor or two capacitors and a resistor. I started off with the simpler one since if it works, then I won’t have to do as much soldering for the two boards.  Since Chris is still working with the ADC, I used an arduino uno with analog pins to read output from the sensor, and went with the more basic circuit initially. It was able to output clear values to the serial monitor, distinguished between polarities as advertised, and when I placed a magnet in an adjacent spot (like where an adjacent square would be), the serial output indicated an output from the sensor around an order of magnitude less than when the magnet was directly above the sensor.  It was ranging on a scale from around 100 to 500, and the sensor is supposed to output between 0 and 2 volts. As a result, although I now know the relative differences between various levels of output from the sensor based on different magnet placements, I still do not know the total voltage outputs based on magnet placements, and will try and have that determined by next week. I am very glad that the magnet does seem to work well, I was very concerned last week that I had made a critical mistake.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I am hoping to get more work done on designing the chained sensors so that I we can test multiple sensors with the ADC.  Initially, that will just involve a few sensors on a breadboard, but hopefully I can design a more expansive test to go through before it comes time to actually solder the pieces together.  I also need to spend some time with the ADC datasheet and the mux datasheets to make sure that I know the appropriate voltage levels they can take in, since I don’t want to blow out any components.  I am roughly half a week behind right now, and hope to catch up over the next week or so. I have the basic circuit working, but until Chris and I get the ADC and the pi working together, I am uncertain how much more of what I can do with the Arduino will translate to the final project with the pi.