This week our team really had to work together to figure out all the details and kinks of our design. We had multiple work sessions where we fleshed out our circuit design and server design.
One of our biggest worries was the amount of components we had to wire. Firstly, we didn’t want to use an excessive amount of GPIO pins as they would be hard to wire. Secondly, with too many wires, our circuit is more prone to errors, can get messy without excellent wire management, and would overall be very difficult to work with. Our goal was to minimize the number of wires we would need in order to still have all the components in our circuit working. The issue with our preliminary design is that we wanted to have LED’s for each settlement and settlement type (e.g. one for the settlement and one for city), one for each road, and one for each tile number. Then, we wanted a button for each settlement and settlement type, a button for each robber location, and a button for each road. This would put our total LED count to 183 (54 settlement & city locations, 57 road locations, 18 number tiles), and our total button count to 183 as well.
We spent some time brainstorming after discussing some possible options with the professor and our TA at our weekly meeting. To solve this problem, we decided to use one long programmable LED strip. This would allow us to only require one connection to the Raspberry Pi, and we can index into the LED and program it accordingly. We can use this LED strip for all our LED purposes, making it a really efficient and cost effective solution. As for our button problem, we decided to fix this by using a 11×11 switch matrix. This 11×11 switch matrix would have 121 possible button locations, and perfectly aligns with the Catan tile array setup. This was still not enough for our 165 total button account, so we decided to use the buttons in a unique way. We would place one at each possible settlement/city location, and they would function as follows:
- Pressing a button once lights up a settlement.
- Pressing it again upgrades it to a city.
- Pressing it a third time turns the light off.
- Pressing two adjacent buttons at once lights up the road between them.
- Pressing those two again turns the road off.
This makes it easy to undo any mistakes, and reduces our required button count to just 72.
We also began curating a parts list, and placed a preliminary order from the inventory. This included the Raspberry Pi 5 which has 40 GPIO pins, and the Oak-d Pro camera to identify our rolled die number.
After this, we began working on our design presentation, and dividing up the labour according to our individual responsibilities. More details can be found in our individual status reports. In general, we are still on track with our current schedule, and the major changes we made were in the design of our circuit as mentioned above.