During this week our group has continued working on our task. The computer students are continuing their work with recognizing the pieces and looking at how to implement a chess engine in unity. The electrical students have worked with testing the electromagnet and continued modeling our system. We have also created a Github where we are going to be able to upload our code to help with the development of the system.

Helge Sondre Ulberg, Oriana Presacan:

During this week we continued to work with unity and managed to identify the pixels of the images taken with the camera, after having filtered the chess board(last week). Now, our goal is to actually recognize the shape of each chess piece. In order to do that we will “draw” a contour along the edges of each array of pixels. we still have to work on that.

Sondre Fuhre Orsten

I have continued working on making a chess game in unity. All my work so far has been uploaded to our GitHub under ChessComputer branch.

Osmar Ferreira de Freitas:

At first we thought of creating our own electromagnets, but we realized that it would take more effort than needed, so we opted to use a 12V/ 3W electromagnet (see image below) off-the-shelf After some tests in 26/09 with the chosen electromagnet, we saw that some specifications must be attended for the proper operation of the system. Such as:

·         The electromagnet must be at least 6mm of the piece.

·         The board must be smooth, so the piece doesn’t suffer friction with it.

·         The electromagnet must have some sort of cooling system, for it can overheat, and can create problems with the system as a whole, and create a fire hazard.

I also created a repository for code management in GitHub, so all teams of development can be aware of the development of each other, as help in the development of the system as a whole. The repository can be found in https://github.com/Shallow-Blue/AutoChess.

Stian Bergstrøm: 

For this week I have been continuing on the design of the chess board. I started on making the joints on the chess board. Because we are going to use an electromagnet to move the pieces, the pieces need to use 25% of the space in each square. That is because we don’t want pieces to crash into each other when moving them. Regular pieces uses around 75% of the squares, so our board is going to be on the bigger side with the larger borders around the squares. FIDE says that size of the squares in tournaments should be between 5-6cm. With our parameters we have 5cm squares. When talking to Richard we found out that we had a problem. The problem is that the laser cutter is not big enough to cut our board who is 60x60cm. Our idea is to use a CNC router instead of a laser cutter to cut the pieces. If that does not work we would probably have to rescale the board and pieces to fit the parameters of the laser cutter. 

This week I have also started on the second iteration of the axis system. We are trying to create a system like the Ultimaker 3d printer uses. Instead of using belts to drive the axis we are going to try to use string instead. In the next week we are going to try to 3d print the pulleys to see if it is a usable system.