What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
- The most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project is the physical hardware design. The pogo pin connections are sometimes not well aligned because the pogo pins are not level with the grid/block. This is temporarily mitigated by placing cardboard support on the grid beside the pogo pin to provide more support for a block to be placed. A more definite mitigation strategy will be to build a proper grid using wood which we are in the process of doing. The wooden grid structure will hold the pogo pins in place and we have purchased magnets as well to align the blocks to the grid when they are being placed.
- Another risk that could jeopardize the success of the project is the circuitry design. The batteries on the block sometimes turn off after repeated use (more than 1 game) but the DMM detects it to still be 9V. We suspect there might be some inaccuraries in how the battery voltage is being shown and the actual functioning of the battery. This only happens when the battery is running low. To mitigate this, we plan to charge all the batteries to their full capacity before any extended testing instead of relying on the indicator to tell us how much power the battery has left.
Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward? Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
- For the grid, we decided to use plywood since it is more sturdy and can better withstand the repeated placement of blocks onto it and the submission button being pressed. We decided to purchase small magnets to be placed on the grid and the blocks for additional alignment as the magnets on the pogo pins might not be strong enough. This was a small amount of cost and did not make a big difference to the budget.
This is also the place to put some photos of your progress or to brag about a component you got working
- This week we reached out MVP! Here are some photos and videos showing the game flow.
- We did a lot of testing and debugging this week to make sure the integration between the webapp and the embedded controller was robust.
- We found out that the pogo pins were sometimes unreliable (as mentioned before) which is due to the levelling issue.
- We also found an edge case where the webapp would crash when the there is a word in the puzzle that is not present in the dictionary. Hence, we added an error checking process.
- We also found that the communication between the Pico and the embedded controller was not very stable against error handling so we added some code for more robust text parsing and error handling.
- We also managed to get all the LCDs on the block to change color when a correct submission is being made.
- We also debug the button bouncing issue so the number of mistakes the webapp records is accurate now.