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Edison Aviles’s Status Report For 04/22

This week I mainly focused on the fabrication of our PCB. I was able to manufacture and finalize testing on 3 out of the 8 needed PCBs. We were able to use a custom made stencil in order to accelarate the process of applying solder paste on our PCB before installing our surface mount components, however it still proved difficult since very tiny solder bridges were forming between our mux pins. I was able to fix some of the PCBs which had this issue and I wasalso  able to finish soldering the through hole components. I wrote a basic script which looped through all the channels of the PCB’s 8:1 mux and held magnets close to each sensor to ensure the sensors were working as expected and the mux was outputting the correct voltage changes.

Although I wasn’t originally assigned to work with our PCB’s fabrication, I decided to help Juan to potentially start integration of the entire system a little sooner. As for my personal schedule, the communication of the entire system is essentially complete. We are missing some minor details that will hopefully be resolved once integration begins.

For the following week I will continue helping with our PCB fabrication as well as begin integration of our hardware and software systems.

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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.