Portfolio

Interdisciplinary Projects

AutoChessboard

I spent the Spring/Summer of 2024 creating an automatic chessboard with a friend. Check it out!

We used a matrix of hall effect sensors and housed magnets in each chess piece, to detect their positions on the board. Servo-powered cars on the underside of the board can then shift pieces to make moves, follwing the pathfinding algorithm I simulated, tested and developed.

Here are some of the fisrt pcbs I made with KiCad. They were used to test several ideas, such as how adding PNP transistors affected readings on our hall effect sensor, and powering rows of the matrix with the ESP32 using multiplexers.

Finally, I consolidated the prototyping phase into one large 2 layer pcb! You can view some of my schematics above, or check out the project's files.

I am currently continuing the development of the pathfinding algorithm as one of the final features to implement in our project! I started with an adaptation of the popular A* algorithm, and created a simulation using python and pygame.

While this is sufficient for routing a chess piece from square to square, lots of complication arises from the restricted nature of the movement of our cars, and having to avoid both collisions between pieces on top of the board, and collisions between cars under the board.

Source: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/gdc99/

I feel myself falling deep into the rabbit hole that is multi-agent pathfinding and steering, encountering some scary words like "combinatorics" and "unaligned collision avoidance" but I'm hoping this will all eventually lead to a successful pathfinding algorithm for this project!

View project files...