Author: winstony

This week I spent time working on a side UI that we could use for different purposes such as displaying a home screen, displaying options, or showing more details for hints on specific cells. I was sick most of the week, so I was unable to progress as much as I had hoped to, but I was able to create a side panel next to the Sudoku board with a few displays that are non-functional.

The side panel I created has a simple layout with placeholder sections that can be customized based on what we decide to show there. I added some basic styling to make sure it matches the overall look of our Sudoku game. I made sure the side screen doesn’t take up too much screen space and will fit into our projection width. I will have to discuss with the team about how we would want to implement the side UI for different purposes before I can progress further. Specifically, we need to decide if we want the panel to change dynamically based on game state or if we can use our numpad for different functions.

This week we had our demo days to showcase what we have created so far. In terms of design, our current system is bare bones and not cohesive, but the core functionality of all the parts have been implemented. On the hardware side, the capacitive touch sensor is working, and the numpad and projector can communicate with our software. However, we do need to continue integrating additional features onto our software. Our hint system is not where we want it to be at the moment, as it only gives the user the answer to a specific cell.

Since last week, I spent more time on the hardware-software integration and finally got the capacitive touch sensor to communicate with the Raspberry Pi through Pygame. Now we no longer need the mouse and keyboard to interact with our Sudoku board. The capacitive touch sensor is used to select a cell and the numpad is used to enter numbers, delete numbers, and ask for a hint. I can now focus fully on just the software, and I’ve begun writing some code to have a multi-functional side screen next to the Sudoku board that we will use for displaying a home screen and options.

This week was dedicated toward getting our software and hardware components working together for a minimum viable product. After testing with the Raspberry Pi, I added to my code so that the Sudoku board would take inputs from the numpad. We were still having trouble getting the capacitive touch sensor to work consistently, so I could not test my code properly to get it to communicate with the Raspberry Pi and Pygame. We plan on meeting tomorrow before our demo day to work on this again and be able to select cells using the touch sensor instead of a mouse. Otherwise, we have put together the rest of our system and can begin final testing for our demo.

This week was focused on our ethics lecture and discussion and getting the solution solver portion of our system functioning.

After last week’s preliminary reading on ethics articles and answering questions, there was an ethics lecture this week to continue getting us to think about the potential impacts of our project. We had the opportunity to do some red teaming with another group, which gave us a wider perspective on how our Sudoku helper might have negative consequences. In particular, how people might become over-reliant on our system which could hurt the Sudoku solving community.

I also looked into potential Sudoku solving packages to use for our system. I began testing py-sudoku, which allows me to generate a random Sudoku puzzle of desired difficulty and create a solution to it. This would allow us to avoid having to store our own set of boards and create a mechanism to prevent repeating a board that the user may have already solved. I have not been able to successfully integrate the package into my existing projection code, but I will get that done next week.

This week I worked on the ethics assignment, met with my team for initial testing and integration, and continued working on my projection code.

The ethics assignment was designed to get us to think about what kind of impacts our project might have in society or the environment. Even a seemingly harmless system like ours that is designed to solve a puzzle can have some kind of harmful effect. It was interesting to read about the hidden effects of a design in Winner’s article.

During our meeting with the professor and TA, we received feedback on our design report. For our final report, we should focus on our writing and expressing our idea better. During the week, we also met up to connect all our peripherals to the Raspberry Pi and run some of our preliminary code on it. I was able to test my projection code and it worked well. We did not yet have our capacitive touch sensor working, so the projection was designed to work only with keyboard and mouse. I was able to write some code that will include signals from the MPR121 (touch sensor), which I will have to test as soon as the touch sensor is operational.

This week, I spent most of my time on working with my team to make final adjustments to our project design using feedback from the design presentation. We went more into detail on how each piece of the system will work as a whole. We focused on details such as the method of selecting a new puzzle with an intuitive user experience. Then, we wrote up our design report with our new design idea thought out. I created some diagrams to better explain our system processes.

Other than the design changes, I continued working with the Pygame library. Now, I can select cells on my board, which become highlighted, and enter a number from 1 to 9. Our projector finally came in this week, so next week my goal is to make it so that it can project the board instead of it just being on a window on my computer screen.

This week was our design presentation week, which Michael volunteered to do. Our initial design changed quite a bit since our first presentation, so we focused on creating new diagrams that would make it clear how all the parts would work together. Class hours were dedicated to listening to other presentations and giving feedback on aspects of their design they can improve on, such as use-case and functionality. Everyone seemed to have taken in the feedback from the first presentation, as their designs were more functional and thought out.

My personal work went into focusing on the projection system. Last week, I had found the Pygame library to be the best option for me to work with, so I began testing some code after downloading the necessary packages. We still do not have the actual projector yet, but I wrote some code creating a new window with a blank Sudoku board on a computer. Based on what I found online, the projector we are looking at, the VANKYO Burger 101 Pico Projector, should work with the packages and Raspberry Pi.