Team AC: Smart Chess board

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.

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.

See https://github.com/dhanna11/capstone.

Currently there’s not much to be done on my end.
I have the GUI and basic single player working, with multiplayer simply being a subset of the single player code.

At this point, we need to integrate our code with our hardware. It doesn’t make sense for me to add anymore complexity to our code until we have a basic board up and running.

I’ll see how I can help with making the board in the upcoming week. In the meantime, I’ve been reviewing my UML, and will be documenting our code for the final report.

 

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.

My work is currently located at git@github.com:dhanna11/capstone.git.

Currently I have a skeleton gui running that repsonds to a selected move, run’s a stockfish analysis and responds with a move.

See commit messages and readme for more. I’ll post a more extensive update tomorrow morning.

Risks

The biggest risk is the software. David is a little more behind schedule than we thought, and it will take time for him to translate his ideas into code. Chris has been helping David prioritize his tasks so that we can have some tasks accomplished by the end of the weekend. These include finishing a basic gui, and getting the basic game logic as move validation working. We are working hard to make sure that the software gets completed on time, but the lack of progress on the software side is definitely the main risk to the project.

Changes to System

None.

Changes to Schedule

We are behind schedule mostly due to software. We were supposed to begin testing of the software this week, but that will have to be pushed back.