This week, I mainly help with testing and debugging the magnetic levitation device. We successfully make levitation work, ensure the feasibility of movement during maglev, test the accuracy requirement for the maglev device, test the interference distance, and deduce the rough general grid size requirement. (More details in Team status report) We also ensure the feasibility of using custom magnets for the maglev device:
For the Go feeding system that I’m responsible for, I designed a brief physical housing for the Go piece magazine and modeled it in Solidworks.
The current risk is that our rough interference distance estimate (about 130 mm) is relatively big compared to the gantry size (500mm x 500mm), which means the grid size (eg. 5×5 vs 6×6) may not be as big as we’d like. For possible mitigations, we need to test more robust locking mechanism, or switch to board games with smaller grid size (eg. Gomoku vs Tik-Tack-Toe)
Next week, we are going to test for electronic magnet locking mechanism and its interference with maglev design and test the gantry accuracy once it arrives. For piece feeding, I will use the laser cutter to cut out the design and see if the go piece mag works.