This week I was able to finish testing the final PCBs. We ran into issues during testing so I replaced the multicore wire on 5 of the PCBs with single core wire. I also mounted the speaker and button modules into the encasing. We have made good progress and are on track to finish the system. I also helped Mukundh to design the new amplification circuit for the speakers.
Edison Aviles’s Status Report for 04/29
This week, my main focus was to continue working on manufacturing the board’s PCBs. I was able to manufacture and test all 8 PCBs that would be required for the full board. We began putting together all the circuits this week and plan to finalize the board manufacturing and testing within the next day or two. This will give us a few more days to fix any potential hiccups on the hardware side and continue integration with the software system. In terms of software, I was able to write a testing script to ensure the functionality of the board once it has been put together – the script loops through all the 64 hall effect sensor outputs and displays changes in the output voltage. This way we can guarantee that the board works as expected as we begin to integrate all the 8 PCBs. However, the majority of my time this week was spent on debugging the PCBs as well as finalizing any missing components – one problem I frequently encountered with the PCBs was fixing solder bridges on the 8:1 muxes, this was a very tedious and time consuming task since I had to manually remove the bridges using a soldering iron.
We’re a little tight on time with our integration schedule, but hope to finish what is left by early this week, this will give us enough time to prepare for the final demo and the rest of the deadliens coming up this week.
By next week, I hope to finish manufacturing and testing our board as well as integrating our hardware and software systems.
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.
Status Report for Mukundh Balajee on 04/29
This week, I focused on ensuring our PCBs were fabricated correctly and properly connected to the 9th MUX. I also helped ensure we can have our PCB neatly placed and positioned within our encasing, to provide minimal clutter and easily accessible. I was also able to run a number of tests on our software systems, to ensure that the move and board legality checker has minimal latency (<25ms) and the sub-system was able to catch all illegal board states and moves. I was able to test the board components for accessibility (braille, piece identification, ease of understanding the board), and decided to modify our braille tiles to be larger to ensure clear comprehension by our blind users. I was also able to provide that our button and speaker circuit work accurately and ensure that they can be powered by our RPi/Arduino, without affecting the performance of our system. I was also able to run some power tests on our button and speaker circuit while keeping in mind the voltage requirements of our PCBs. Finally, I was able to determine the latency for communication between the Arduino and RPi (<80ms), and also the vocalization system(~<500ms). I was able to ensure that our sub-systems were within their individual latency requirements for MVP and plan to reduce latency post-MVP.
We are slightly behind schedule because of a delay in the arrival of our magnets and PCBs, however, we plan to finish the integration by this weekend and start our system tests and integration tests next week, before our final demo.
By next week, we hope to have our project completely done and ready to be used!
Juan Mejia’s Status Report for 4/22
This week, was mostly focused on hardware. I took the time to redesign and laser cut the top of the board so that it was one piece with slots to glue in the braille tiles. I also engraved the corresponding letters around the border of the board to improve accessibility. Since the PCB arrived this week, I spent a good 12 hours soldering components to the PCBs using solder paste and using manual solder. On the second day of solder, me and Edison started to test 3 of the PCBs that we completed. We had a few bugs. There is still some work to complete as I will be mounting our internal components and soldering more PCBs, come Sunday and Monday.
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.
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.
Mukundh Balajee’s Status Report for 04/22
This week, I was able to help Edison solder the PCB. I focused the majority of my time on the piece detection logic, by choosing accurate magnets and magnetic strengths for each piece. After that, I was able to write Arduino code to generate a move based on the number of sensors we had (one fabricated row). This way I was able to generate a move and send the move over to be validated and sent to lichess.org.
We are currently slightly behind schedule because of delays in our orders for PCBs and magnets. However, we have been able to make significant progress with fabricating our PCBs and have at least a semi-functional board by this weekend.
This next week, I hope to be able to integrate the MUX logic with our existing software logic and connect the PCBs. I also hope to be able to attach the speaker to the board and help complete the board to make it a functional product. This week, I also hope to be able to perform as much testing as possible to ensure the integrity of the product.
Juan Mejia’s Status Report for 4/8/23
This week I focused on designing the holders for all our components in side our board. I also designed the power circuit necessary to power the entire hardware system. On the side I also engrave the top of our case with slots to put the braille tiles as well as engrave the letters next to them. In terms of schedule, I am waiting on the PCB and other hardware components to finish up the board.
Mukundh Balajee’s Status Report for 04/08
This week, I ensured communication between different systems worked as expected. This includes connecting our Arduino, and RPi to communicate with each other and information flowed accurately between the two systems. I was also able to manufacture our pieces and print all pour components required for blind users to play physical chess.
Currently, we are slightly behind on our schedule as our PCBs had to be re-fabricated and re-ordered. This delay could potentially affect us, however, I have been able to simulate the testing script to ensure that our current system works correctly, so that we would only have to establish communication between the physical board and the online platform.
Regarding testing and validation, I have been able to add error logs in my software scripts to ensure I can catch any error by monitoring the errors.log file. Since we do not have our hardware components yet, we decided to simulate inputs like it would be made by a user, to play a game of chess with an online player. We also have been measuring our latency goals as we develop, to ensure we stay within our target. We have been user-testing our pieces to ensure our blind users can recognize pieces correctly, and identify the coordinates with the braille notation.
For next week, I plan on finishing the fabrication of our PCB and having our PCB powered, and connected to our software system. I also plan to ensure we have a fully functional button system for starting a game and performing other functions required for the game of chess, and also make sure we have our speaker embedded in our board.