Week assignments

Individual assignment:

• Complete your final project tracking your progress.

You can find my final project details here.

What tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?

What tasks have been completed:

• All my PCBs have been soldered and programmed.
• My chesspieces pressfit have been designed and assembled.
• The chessboard enclosure with living hinges is completed to
• My sensing board has been covered with copper squares electrodes.
• The code to play lichess.org with a file through a python code

What tasks remain:

• More exceptions handler into the code to avoid interuptions
• Fine tuning the code to improve capacitive detection and decrease latency
• Two more seven segments for clock display or an LCD screen
• Adding a bluetooth chip to remove the cable
• Create a mobile app to play only with a phone

what has worked? what hasn't?

At first I wanted to detect my chess pieces magnetically but it was a bit expensive and I found the solution of detecting them capacitively very elegant. Therefore, the very important point of detecting pieces has work. Now it is hard to have a very accurate signal with a short time response which explain the latency I have between the time I move my piece and the time it is sensed.

I remembered having looked at lichess.org a few months before fabacademy to see how to interact on it with python and it was difficult. But, in the meantime, the have developed and documented a nice API which is very easy to use. Therefore the website communication has been a success.

In the time that I had I coulnd't develop a very strong code with many exceptions handler. So it can hapens that the code stops because of one capacitive value was not sensed or because a square of the chessboard is triggered when it shouldn't. I still have some improvments to do on that point.

Eventually, at the very begining, I dreamed of a bluetooth connected chessboard with a mobile app. That doesn't seems technically too difficult to me anymore thanks to the fabacademy but it was obviously to much work in the given time with, in addition, my work as a labmanager in the kazlab.

what questions need to be resolved?

Well to complete the project, I will need next week to improve my code to handle exceptions and I also think I will need it to be able to have a specific threshold per board because the four of them are not exactly the same due to hand soldering and hand sticking the copper tape.

I will also have to implement capturing situation into the code. For that I think I will ask the player to first remove the captured piece and then to move the capturing piece on to the square.

what will happen when?

In the next days, I will design the casing of my board, I will solder my remaining boards and finish my code.

In the futur I'd like to improve the board to be functionning with a mobile app

what have you learned?

Where to start ? I learned so much about electronics, vector design, toolpath configurations. But most important I gained confidence in what I can make in what amount of time. I learned a lot about how to share my projects and how to manage it in time. I would love next year to be an instructor to give back what I received during 6 months.