Author: winstony

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.

This week, I had been testing some code with OpenCV on a random Sudoku board image I pulled from the internet. I made the image grayscale and applied adaptive thresholding to make the text black and background white. I was struggling with isolating the Sudoku board and detecting each cell before our team dropped the image processing idea.

After discussion with our advisors, our team decided that the camera idea did not make sense for our use case. Rather, we would implement a capacitive touch sensor grid that would make the Sudoku board more interactive and intuitive. This would give our project more hardware complexity and on the software side, allow us to focus more on the unique part of our project: the hint algorithm and projection.

My focus shifted towards the projection implementation after dropping the CV aspect. I am now looking into using Pygame, which is a Python library that already has tools for handling graphics, animations, and user inputs. It works with Raspberry Pi and GPIO inputs such as our numpad and buttons and updates the projection in real-time when the user makes an input.

The social factor that our project meets is for physical and cognitive accessibility. Individuals who may have difficulty with fine motor skills such as handwriting will have an easier time interacting with our board, and those with visual impairments can see easier on our large board display. Our Sudoku algorithm is aimed to help people of all skill levels and teach users how to work through a Sudoku puzzle and improve their problem solving skills.

This week was proposal presentation week, so we did some more research on what hardware and software we would use and finalized our idea. We prepared our presentation and decided I would present, so I spent a lot of time practicing. During class, we listened to other groups’ presentations and provided feedback. We also received some feedback and decided to shift our priorities and scheduling a bit to have a minimum viable product as soon as possible and continue developing iteratively.

Since I am in charge of the image processing and digit recognition, I looked some more into how OpenCV and Tesseract works. I do not have any computer vision experience, so these tools were new to me. Fortunately, Sudoku boards are fairly simple, so the processing seems straightforward. I would like to be able to test some code once we have our hardware.