General update
- Gantry progress has been good, although it was slightly delayed by issues with wood shops on campus. We have the box assembled and will be doing more testing over the coming days to verify proper movement of the chess pieces. We believe this part of the project is almost done! Just putting the finishing touches on the design now.
- Liam has been making good progress with the gaze detection, and he now has a better way to test the results as a person sits in front of the camera. He will continue to make this better over the coming days as he carries out more testing. This will also allow him to calibrate the model for better results overall.
Potential risks and risk management
- No new risks this week. We created a speech-to-text model that would act as a backup to the gaze estimation, although we are still confident in our ability to finish the gaze detection as expected. We believe the speech element would still meet our use case requirements as it does not require any physical motion by the user. This model has proven to be quite accurate as we speak into a computer microphone.
Overall design changes
- The one new design change is a small one. We will be using an NMOS in a small circuit to handle powering on the electromagnet. This is because the Arduino does not have a 5V output pin that can switch from high to low. We will use one of the 3.3V output pins to power the gate of an NMOS, which will act as a type of switch (although imperfect) to power on the electromagnet with the necessary 5V.
Schedule
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Our schedule does not have any major changes. We are ready to buckle down and do whatever work is necessary to finish this project and have a great presentation and demo at the end of the semester!
Validation
There are a few ways that we, as a team, plan to validate our design. This will look a lot at whether our project is still meeting the user needs.
- Revisit Initial Use Case Requirements: This will be talked about throughout the following points, but we want to go back and ensure we are hitting the use case we originally thought about. The idea was most clear at the beginning, and we want to be sure we did not stray from that concept.
- Accessibility of Gaze Model: We plan to bring in some of our friends and classmates to get a wide audience of people to test our camera model on. This will allow us to test all sorts of eye sizes and shapes to build a design that is accessible to as many people as possible. After all, our design sets out to make chess accessible to as many people as possible.
- Non-Physical Gameplay: As we carry out our testing, we want to make sure that every aspect of the gameplay is non-physical. This is to make sure that our system can be played by people who are not able to physically move certain aspects themselves, which is our entire use case. This means that the camera should not have to be adjusted, the pieces should be placed properly, and the electronics should work without physical interaction.
- Hidden Devices: One of the important needs that we set forward was an unobtrusive design. As we continue to assemble the system and test, we will be sure that all computational circuitry (and gantry components) are hidden away so that they do not detract from the game. This will continue to guide our decisions during assembly and placement.
- Speed of System: One major user need that we recognize is the speed of our system. We do not want moves to take too long for users to become uninterested and discouraged. Therefore, we plan to iterate during testing to improve any unneeded latency and make the game flow continuously as much as possible.
- Accuracy: Although this is mostly testing in verification, accuracy is the most crucial part of our user needs. If our system is not accurate, it will not be used. Therefore, as we go through testing, we will be sure that accuracy is at the forefront of our validation and make changes when necessary to prioritize this metric.
- Remapping our Stakeholders: As we look toward a completed design, we think it may be interesting to look back at the ethics assignment for this class. Are we considering the stakeholders properly? Are we keeping bias and our own pride out of our design? We want to be sure that we are still aligned with the people most affected by our system.