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Team Status Report for 04/29

Our most significant risk is our PCB fabrication process, as none of us have past experience, and we have been teaching ourselves ways to fabricate and debug our circuits. We have been able to make significant progress despite the delays in our orders, to have all our PCBs fabricated and tested, and ready to be integrated with the rest of our system, to ensure complete functionality.

 

Edison has been leading the PCB fabrication process, and has helped carry out individual tests on each row PCB as they’re fabricated, and also on all 8 of them. This has helped us understand the flaws in our soldering job and helped us fix these mistakes in future PCBs. Mukundh was able to run individual unit tests on all the software subsystems to ensure proper functionality and performance. He was also able to run some power tests on the button and speaker circuits to ensure there is no voltage issues when powering the PCBs, buttons, and speakers on the board. Apart from these technical tests, he was also able to test our board for accessibility and ease of use with our blind users and decided that we needed to increase the size of our braille annotations.

Finally, we decided to incorporate some design changes based on the research we did. We planned to move away from batteries and use just our RPi’s GPIO pins and the Arduino Uno to power our entire board. This resulted in a cheaper and more compact solution, resulting in no limit on the battery life. As mentioned in past reports, we did move away from 3D printing our board to instead just laser cutting it from wood, to reduce our costs. Lastly, we increased the size of our braille tiles to help our blind users be able to tell the difference.

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Team Status Report for 04/22

Due to the delays we experienced with the parts we ordered, our biggest risk is being able to test our parts and ensure we don’t need to pivot or order any new parts. Also, because of a delay in our PCBs, we have been set back a little. We hope to finish the fabrication of all the PCBs this weekend, as we currently have 3 rows fabricated.

We made a change in our design from using batteries to instead being plugged into a wall outlet, as this would reduce costs, and also make our system more compact. Apart from this, we have not changed any of our original plans until MVP.

Our schedule has not changed significantly, even though we had delays with our parts, as we were able to catch up on some work during the week of carnival to account for any delays in the following weeks.

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Team Status Report for 04/08

Currently, we are waiting on our PCB, which would be our most significant risk, as none of us have experience fabricating a PCB or using solder paste and the oven. We hope to get trained for this as soon as possible and fabricate our PCB right after.

This week, our team focused on making substantial progress in our communication and hardware logic, as well as board and PCB design. In terms of our communication and validation logic, Mukundh and Edison focused on establishing connection from the Arduino and RPi while sending information through both systems. Mukundh added calibration logic to our arduino design which allows the system to calibrate the sensors prior to starting a game, by doing this we can establish a range for our hall effect’s idle voltage readings. Calibrating the sensors and allocating this information will help us solidify our piece detection logic in the near future. Mukundh and Edison were also able to send hard coded moves from the Arduino to the RPi and then to Lichess.org (once the moves were validated and if they were valid). This means that the software logic of the project is nearly done, our group would then need to focus on integration and testing. Juan spent some time designing our board’s encasing and redesigning our PCB – we had issues with patch sizes and needed to reorder our design in order to adequately solder the surface mount components onto the board. Mukundh was also able to 3D print all of our pieces and braille coordinates which will be glued onto the board encasing in order to help our users guide themselves across the board.

As for testing and validation, we will be individually testing and validating our systems. Once all of our individual systems have been validated we will run integration tests to guarantee data is being sent across the entire system correctly and the system is able to perform under the goal system delay. We will also be testing each individual hall effect sensor that is mounted onto the PCB, in order to guarantee the sensors are working as expected before testing the entirety of the PCB. In order to test the PCB and detection logic, we will manually move pieces across the board, simulating game moves, to measure how accurate the system is reading the infromation in order to achieve our goal system accuracy.

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Team Status Report for 04/01

The most significant risks currently are fabricating our PCB and soldering its surface mounts. This week we were able to try soldering our components, however, due to a lack of expertise, we fried two PCBs. We have contacted the ECE staff to get permission to use the soldering paste and oven to make it easier. However, if that does not work, we will use Perf boards and solder our components on it.

Instead of 3D printing our board, we decided to laser cut our board and the encasing. As for our braille notation, we decided to 3D print the portions of the board that would require braille and make a casing for these on the board. In order to differentiate between white and black pieces, we decided to incorporate a new design for the different colored pieces which essentially adds a point top to black pieces; this type of design is common in chess boards targeted for blind users.

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Team Status Report for 03/25

The most significant risk at the moment is our ability to vary magnetic strength precisely to ensure accurate piece detection. We have ordered different strength magnets and printed a couple of pieces and a chess board, to test our circuitry and sensors. We plan to use pre-made pieces which would compromise on the accessibility feature we plan to have.

Currently, we have no major design updates. We have been user-testing our hardware to get an understanding of what works best for our user given our budget and timeframe.

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Team Status Report for 03/18

Our current risks are the arrival of our PCBs on time and the manufacturing of our hardware components, which involves laser cutting the board, 3D printing the pieces, and ordering the PCBs and the required components to make the connections on the PCB. We have Juan working on this and placing the orders this weekend so that we can test our circuits and place our order for all 8 columns soon. We also plan to split the task of printing the pieces and have Mukundh and Edison also involved in the manufacturing of the board.

We decided that instead of 3D printing the board, we were gonna laser cut it, to give it the same textures as before. This was a cheaper option given the scale of our board. Apart from this, we have been modifying our software systems. We are reconsidering the use of the Web Application, and also how we want to store, send/receive, and handle data to ensure minimal latency.

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Team Report for 03/11

Currently, the delay in the arrival of our Hall Effect sensors, adds an extra time crunch to send our PCB out for fabrication as soon as possible, which would involve testing the sensors as soon as they arrive. Mukundh and Juan are currently learning how to use Autodesk and Eagle to help with PCB Fabrication, and they have also gone over their circuits to check for any theoretical flaws they were able to identify. We have moved our schedule around and worked on future tasks to help keep us somewhat on track.

We decided to get rid of an Arduino Uno, and instead just use an 8-channel ADC, as we realized that this was a cheaper option and did exactly what an Arduino Uno would do. This helps us use our budget for other purposes and be economically wise.

As highlighted in our individual Status Reports, for this week, we have identified some technical challenges which we would haveto overcome. For instance, Juan and Mukundh are learning how to use AutoDesk and Eagle, Edison and Mukundh are learning how to use an RPI as this is their first time using it, and also how to connect the RPito a web app and to the Physical Board.

Below is our updated gantt chart which takes into consideration the delays we’ve experienced with the delivery of our sensors. Due to these set backs, we’ve had to readjust the dates for sensor testing, as well as PCB fabrication – since our PCB will be based on the results of our testing.

Schedule

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Team Report for 2/25

We currently do not have the parts for our circuit, so this has set us back and affected our timeline. We are currently looking at different circuit options to help finalize our circuit. We hope to be able to have our circuit done and ready for fabrication by the end of this week (the beginning of Spring Break) in order to fix any possible mistakes on the PCB as soon as we return from Spring Break.

We have updated our team work assignments to take into account the delay of our hall effect sensors and PCB fabrication. We also had a few miscommunications that lead to the board design and pieces not being printed on time. In order to account for our schedule changes we have moved things around in our gantt chart and prioritized specific tasks. The top priority for this coming week is PCB fabrication, the reasoning behind this was to match delivery time with Spring Break and begin testing as soon as we return. This coming week we have divided up the work as follows:

Edison: Finalize move legality script and  its respective testing script, finish web application board and lichess.org live game communication.

Mukundh: Unit testing for the hall effect sensors, adding braille notation to 3D designs, begin and finalize autodesk design for PCB

Juan: Finish the 3D printing of two board and piece design in order to test for the best configuration. PCB design. Also work on piece vocalization using Raspberry Pi/Arduino

We had no major design changes this week. We had to order new hall effect sensors in order to test on a breadboard, prior to fabricating our PCB. This lead to an increase cost of $16 for the unit testing. The vocalization change cost has not been determined as we might be able to get a free speaker for the Arduino in a kit that Juan has.

We updated our schedule to account for certain issues that came up. We ordered the wrong part, so we had to push our circuit testing by a week, and move certain tasks earlier to account for the delay. The updated schedule has been attached here.

 

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Team Status Report for 2/18

We are currently in the process of testing our circuit for the detection of magnetic fields, which is the most crucial part of our project. As mentioned during our presentations, piece detection is one of our big technical challenges. We hope to challenge this task with the help of multiple online resources, which have similar applications to our circuit. As a contingency plan, we think we hope to follow different circuits we have found online, and possibly add modifications to fit our requirements. We have also focused our energy to familiarizing ourselves with the lichess.org API we’re using for our web application backend and have made good progress at implementing some functions that will be necessary in future iterations of our board (i.e. making moves on an ongoing chess game).

Our team focused on two principles of engineering – testability and integrity. We want our design to be easily testable as well as guarantees integrity across the board. We did this by dividing the system into easy to test subsystems to guarantee integrity at each point of the design. By unit testing each component we can then focus our energy into testing the integration of all the subsystems as a whole.

 

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Team Status Report for 2/11

Our knowledge on PCB Fabrication is very limited, and learning this skill and perfecting it to develop a correct PCB will be a challenge. For this, we have started with the PCB Fabrication step first, to give us enough time to perfect it with the help of our TAs (if needed). We also feel like there might be a slight challenge in understanding how the hall sensors might work, and distinguishing between individual pieces for each color based on the hall effect sensor. We are working with our TAs and also doing our individual research to get a better understanding of Hall Effect sensors. We plan to tackle our weak spots for this project initially, thereby giving us enough time to perfect the project.

In terms of design, we opted out of using chess.com’s public API since it did not provide the ability to make moves during live games. As an alternative, we have chosen to use lichess.org’s API since it provides a larger range of capabilities, such as making moves during a live chess game. We have also started contemplating the possibility of incorporating extra magnets in our chess piece designs in order to distinguish each individual piece in our smart board based on a variety of magnetic field strengths. This would allow us to guarantee the integrity of the board at all times, not just based off trusting the user to place all the pieces where they’re supposed to be.

Our project includes considerations for user accessibility, our main target audience is the community of visually impaired chess players who are seeking to experience online chess with the rest of the chess community. Through our project we hope to bridge the gap between the visually impaired chess players and the rest of the online chess community.