Month: March 2026

I made a lot of progress this week. We have our gantry system and board setup so I spent a lot of time figuring out the mechanics of how we were going to attach the game boards to the flexyboard, where it sits with respect to the gantry system, and how to attach the magnets to the gantry and the game pieces. I hot glued magnets to all the game pieces. I also drew out game boards as the ones we ordered were too large and the magnetized pieces seemed to move better on paper instead of the thicker/clunkier cardboard game boards with creases. Also, none of us had played the game sorry in years so it was different than we anticipated and the game pieces were not compatible with our project design. Because of this, I stopped by Games Unlimited and found parcheesi, a game that works a bit better with FlexyBoard as it does require players to draw cards(like sorry does). All of us helped assemble the stand for the Camera, and I did a bit of cosmetic work with a hacksaw and file to smooth out the screws that were sticking out of the stand and it’s not such a safety hazard anymore. Overall I’d say my progress is on schedule, but we do have lots of things to get done in order to be prepared for the final presentation/showcase. I’ve picked up the additional responsibility of working on the software for the player 2 interface so that is what I will be working on next week.

This week I worked on the project mainly through design/planning work,  and project coursework that supports the overall development of FlexyBoard. I spent time along with my teammates looking at the specific magnets we need for the gantry, and I also worked on the ethics assignment tied to the project, which took a meaningful amount of time and will continue to feed into our design decisions. In addition, I contributed to progress on materials/planning for the build, including work related to the magnets and game boards. I’ve done work looking at the gantry and figuring out how the dimensions of the gantry will work with our game boards. We’ve noticed that the x-y plane the gantry covers is not centered on the plexiglass encasement so we are trying to figure out how to place the game board. I made a few small modifications to the gantry removing previous parts that were there since we are using a second hand gantry.  I would say my progress is generally on schedule, although next week needs to be more focused on direct implementation work so we can keep pace with the build and testing timeline. To stay on track, I plan to spend more time on the actual gantry work next week while also continuing discussion with my team on the ethics portion. My main deliverables for next week are writing some preliminary code to get the gantry moving to specific x-y positions.