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Mukundh Balajee Status Report for 2/25

For this week, I was able to design our board on Rhino, and 3D print a test piece to make sure our pieces and board were as expected. I was able to access the Stockfish API and use it to generate and play a game.

This week, we had to reorder our Hall Effect Sensors as we initially ordered the wrong parts. This has set us back a little bit, so we were able to catch up on other tasks and get ahead on them to make up for this loss of time.

By next week, we hope to test our circuit and start/send our board for PCB Fabrication. We also hope to have our chess board modeled with Braille notations and spaces for external elements. We also plan on setting up our RPi and uploading our scripts to make sure we can proceed with further development of the accessible features.

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Edison Aviles’s Status Report for 2/25

This week my main focus was to combine the concepts I was working with last week to display a live and interactive board on the website. This was a difficult process since I wanted to avoid using any unnecessary APIs since it would require reading more documentation and familiarizing myself with more libraries. However, after hitting a wall and not being able to figure out any way to embed the live game into our team website I decided to look into different chessboard APIs. I came across Chessground and Chess.js – Chessground is able to display an interactive chessboard on your website and Chess.js is able to add functionality to it. After learning how to create a pretty basic working chessboard I began learning how to incorporate lichess.org API calls to create a live copy of the actual lichess.org game. In order to accomplish this I establish a seek stream, which updates the page once a game is found by passing the unique game id into the page url – which I can then access. After accessing the game id I can establish a stream of all the moves being made on that specific game. I could then make moves on the local board, POST that information to lichess and wait for the opponent to make a move and then replicate that move on the board. The state update is limited to 500ms given lichess’s latency limit, so there is some slight lag between the live game and the game displayed on the web application, but it’s not very noticeable and we had already accounted for the limit in our system requirements.

I also contributed to project management by reevaluating the schedule and establishing weekly to do lists to keep track of what needs to be accomplished on a week to week basis.

Right now, I’m not behind on the web application process – I’d say I’ve made a lot of progress on this specific portion of the project. I do need to solidify some basic parts of the website, however I feel by focusing on board functionality and communication with live games I’ll be able to allow the rest of the team to progress and integrate while I finish portions of the UI and user experience.

I want to finalize all of the play game functionalities – seeking a game against a live opponent and seeking a game against a computer. Moreover I want to add the UI for the play game page and finalize implementing the mobile view designs. I would also like to start testing communication between RPi and web application to have a concrete idea of what has to be done once we return from spring break. I want to focus on making as much progress as possible on the web application before leaving for spring break since I do not plan on working that week.

Video of current state of board:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1umWu0pNsFbKbg3nYzfbZqnBq-ESkGbsc/view?usp=sharing

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Juan Mejia’s Status Report for 2/18/23

This week was focused on designing the test circuit in order to figure out the output for the hall effect sensors. The other categories that I focused on were researching the proper components from Raspberry and designing the chess pieces in CAD.  In order to achieve the connectivity, I requested the Compute IO board from ECE resources, but I have found it difficult to find an available Compute 4 Board. I might need to pivot to using a Raspberry 4 Board. For the CAD, I managed to design the rook and pawn pieces manually, but after the suggestion of Mukundh I am going to use 3D models for piece found online. After meeting with Will and Professor Gary, our team updated our schedule for the nest two weeks, so we our on schedule. This coming week, I hope to work with Mukundh to get a understanding of the hall effect sensors and start using AutoDesk for the PCB.

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Mukundh Balajee’s Status Report for 2/18

This week, I worked with Juan and started working on our circuit to detect magnetic fields with the Hall Effect sensors. We decided to try mimicking the circuit on a breadboard, before sending it out for PCB fabrication. We were able to place orders for specific parts we need for our project, and we started working on designing our chess board. We are planning on making the current designs for the chess board, as accessible as possible (for our visually impaired users) by adding braille annotations.

 

Our progress for the project has been on track. We were able to modify our schedule and push our goal of sending out the board for fabrication a couple of weeks later. We instead plan on working on a breadboard, and perfecting the circuit before fabrication. Edison has been able to make a good progress on the website and has it connected to lichess.org currently.

By next week, we hope to be able to print out our board, test our circuits out and be able to detect pieces on the board on our web app (if possible).

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Mukundh Balajee’s Status Report for 2/3/23

The majority of this week was involved in presentations and finalizing our abstract and project proposal. I was able to make progress on delegating work, and I have started work on learning Eagle to better understand the process for PCB fabrication, as it is a new area for all of us. I was able to follow some online tutorials, and gain a basic understanding on what PCB Fabrication is and how it is done. I plan to use the virtual andrew machines to access eagle and get started on working on the PCB fabrication for our board. 

 

Currently, we are just on track with our schedule, however, I would like to move a little ahead of schedule to give us more time for testing and integration. I plan to do this by completing the PCB Fabrication this upcoming week, and getting started, and hopefully completing the 3D printing of our custom board. 

 

By next week, we hope to have a basic board printed out, the PCB order sent out, and start working on our website to connect to platforms like lichess.org. To help us stay ahead of schedule, I plan to work on the website with Edison, while Juan Mejia works on the integration of the board with the arduino and converting the analog signals into digital signals, before transmitting it to the Raspberry Pi.