This week, my main goal was to conduct research on the API’s we plan on using in our project’s design. We had originally planned to use chess.com as our chess API, but upon reading the API’s documentation we quickly realized that it wouldn’t be viable since chess.com didn’t allow for POST requests for moves to be made in live chess games. Upon more research I came across lichess.org. After thoroughly reading their API’s documentation, I found that their API would be perfect for our project. Lichess.org’s API allows us to do various game specific moves through GET and POST requests, for example we can initiate games, make moves, and even surrender a game through the use of their API. By doing this research before starting to build the full stack infrastructure for our application it’ll allow us to make less mistakes and have a clearer understanding of what to do in terms of API calls.
My other focus for the week was to better understand hall effect sensors and how these could potentially be used to not only identify between black or white pieces, but also between specific types of pieces. I spoke with professor Gary Fedder on a potential solution that uses variations in electromagnetic field strengths to help us identify specifically what piece is placed on a tile. We can achieve this by varying magnet positions in each piece, varying the polarity of the magnets, or even varying the number of magnets in each piece. By being able to validate what piece is on each tile we can guarantee the integrity of the board at all times, even if pieces are accidentally knocked over. This research will help us in the near future while we finalize design plans for the project.
During next week, I hope to finalize designs for the software side of the project as well as starting to implement a local instance of our project’s web application.
Lichess.org API documentation: https://lichess.org/api
Hall Effect Sensors: https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/electromagnetism/hall-effect.html