There were no changed made to the existing design of the system in the past two weeks. Shown below are some of the processed images of words on a Scrabble board that Cody used to find the contours of letters. As he noted, some of the curve-less letters are harder to pick up.
Part A (Written by Denis): Scrabble is a global board game, with over 150 million copies sold all-time. This means that most people are at least tangentially aware of what Scrabble is. We are attempting to make our project have a global use case by using low cost materials and portable, common power sources. The only major difference that we would have to make would be adjusting the plug that we put into the outlet, as that changes depending upon where you are in the world. If we were to create this as a world-wide product, we would have to adjust the powering of our main RPi, in order that it could work overseas. Another consideration we have made would be for those who are more unfamiliar with tech. If we were to create this as a product for consumers, we would likely send it as close to being ready as possible, and with a detailed user manual for setup/calibration.
Part B (Written by Jolie): Scrabble is sold in 28 different languages across the world. Those 28 languages encompass a large portion of the world’s population. Although our project is geared towards the English version, all that would need to be done differently is to use a different letter recognition library that can interpret characters from various languages and a Scrabble dictionary in that language. Aside from that, Scrabbletron would be versatile enough to be used in any other country where one of those 28 languages is spoken because the rules of the game remain the same. Across these languages, the need for an aid to the administrative tasks of Scrabble persist, so our project will meet these goals in any language.
Part C (Written by Cody): While we have not identified any serious environmental concerns, there are a few considerations to make for a project like ours. First, our system uses power for the CV computation and LCD displays. The plant generating this power could certainly have environmental impacts, so it’s important to make our system as energy-efficient as possible by writing quality code. Secondly, we have considered the impact of the physical materials our system uses. We are introducing multiple electrical components to the standard Scrabble setup, some of which (like the displays) have batteries which could be environmentally harmful if disposed of improperly at the end of their life cycles. One marginal improvement we’ve made to limit the physical materials is the switch to wireless communication.