Most of this week was used to test out and do some minor tweaking to the system to get ready for the interim demo. With new cards, I was able to reproduce the low error rate dispensing, proving that the dispensing accuracy is highly dependent on the card condition. Also, David and I worked on integrating the IR sensor into the system, which was successful. This lets the user press one less button during the game, making it more automated. With the new filament we just got, I have also started printing different versions of the dispenser’s front end to test it out for the next couple of weeks. My goal is to minimize the times we have to manually pull out the cards from the bottom, and make it fix itself when it detects the card has not been dispensed this time.
I am currently on schedule, and next week I would like to get the official chassis rotation testing data, test out different dispensers that are printing currently, and get IR sensor accuracy data for the dispenser.
In terms of verification, a lot has been done so far on the hardware portion. Most of these were performed with David together as it requires some kind of driver/software to enable the motors.
- The dispenser has been tested by continuously dispensing 10 decks of cards(1090 cards in total), and I was able to get a sub 2% error rate, lower than our required 5% error rate. Also, the latency of the dispensing itself is measured both by using the delays in the Arduino code as well as physically timing it. It is a bit slower than our design requirements, but we figured it is necessary to give enough delay in order to get a higher dispensing accuracy. This only hurts during the initial dealing phase since the latency of card dealing in the middle of the game is easily masked by the human latency of thinking and putting down the card they want, making it a minimal change to the players.
- After the addition of the IR sensor, we checked that the sensor is able to accurately pick up (no errors so far) whenever a card is dispensed. I will get official numbers on the accuracy by dispensing a bunch of cards and see how many times it mistakes a dispense. We want to make sure that this is accurate, probably close to 95~97% so that we deal the right number of cards to each player. This was not part of our initial design, so we don’t have any numbers promised. However, it should be considered as part of the dispenser accuracy, so combined 95% accuracy, or 6 mistakes/deck. This will let the users not get too distracted to fix the errors in the game state.
- Chassis rotation has been unofficially tested by using visual inspection, and we are confident that it will stay within +-10 degrees throughout the game, which is our design requirement. I will be setting up the actual testing environment next week by marking the middle of each side of the chassis and the base. Then throughout a game, I will check if the angle between the chassis mark and the base mark stay within our requirement using a protractor. This ensures the card dealt is relatively within the reach of each respective player, and +-10 degrees seems appropriate.