Most Significant Risks

The PCB needs to be designed and simulated before sending the design out for printing. If we don’t get the design sent out soon, this might delay our current plan to have a basic full-system operation working before the interim demo. We are going to manage the risk of not getting it done in time by finishing the design by Monday of next week. This will allow us about one week of printing time and one week to test the full hardware with the PCB. Our interim demo is in 2 weeks, so we hope to have a full system demo for at least one in-game action working by then. Our contingency plan is to have the interim demo with only one motor in each subsystem directly connected to the motor driver. This will allow the users some idea of how the feedback system will work even if it won’t provide the amount of feedback we plan to have for the final. 

Changes to Existing Design

Upon consulting with Omkar and Professor Gary Fedder, we have decided to completely abandon the game code translation process. Instead we will be going back to the original strategy of using JavaScript event listeners to track different game actions. This changes our software design in that we will be using socket.io to relay information to the Node JS server and the server will then use the serial port package to send this information to our Arduino. This change was necessary because limited progress was made in transferring the AI component of the game code from Javascript, HTML and CSS to Node JS.

Additionally, we previously had differing ideas on how the PCB would be mounted and connect to the motors, but upon our meeting with Professor Gary and Omkar this week, we decided that the motors should be mounted separately, and the PCB should be attached to the motor mounting plate instead of it being one entire system. This will make our design more modular to changes since it’s easier to laser cut a new mounting plate than it is to design a new PCB if we want to make slight changes to the motor positions. 

Updated Schedule

N/A. Somehow, we’re not off schedule yet.