Devank Agarwal Status Report March for 11th

This status report is going to cover the weeks of Feb 27th to March 4th and March 5th to March 11th.

For the former week:

During this week we finally got a hold of the wood required to build the frame. Jimmy and I made a trip to Home Depot on Monday to pick the wood up. Not realizing the impracticality of carrying 2 4×8 feet big pieces of plywood we decided to chop the wood up into the following dimensions so that it would still meet our requirements:
a. 2 4×4 pieces.

b. 1 3×4 piece.

c. 1 5×4 piece.

We were then able to get the wood back and keep it safely in the capstone room. I spent the next week constructing the wooden frame and ran into an. issue. The original design we had did not have enough structural integrity at the top of the frame to prevent extraneous wobble. So to counter that we added 3 blocks of 4x3x2 inch pieces of wood along with wood glue and a bracket externally to support the entire structure at the 90-degree angle. This is what the side of joints of the system look like:

The Final structure of the frame system looks like this:

To add more structural support I shall be doing the same mechanism for attaching on the bottom and possible diagonal stress bearing rods might be added as well.

Apart from the frame, I helped on the design report for the team this week. I completed the architecture, the design requirements and the trade studies as well along with overall helping in the final editing of the document. Since constructing the frame took up a decent chunk of time I did not have time to work on the software as much as I would have liked to during the week.

The Second Week: 

This week was spring break and for the first 6 days of break I was out of the country and thus was not able to work on the project. However after coming back, I have developed the shot calculation algorithm a little more. As of now, simply given a set of x and y coordinates and a 2-bit value with each coordinate (00 to represent solids, 01 for solids, 10 for the 8 ball and 11 for the black ball) I am able to plot lines from the cue ball to the target balls and remove the lines which have another ball intersecting that line. Next step in algorithm is to write a function that given a ball and a line from the cue ball to that line, will be able to find the easiest pocket to put that ball into. I am assuming the initial function I wrote to check for collisions between cue ball and target ball can be applied albeit slightly modified where the the target ball will become the cue ball in this scenario and the pocket will become the target ball. I am thinking of adding a parameter to this function to tell it which kind of calculation to do. I am on track to finish the software backend despite the delay of the pool frame.