Initial Thoughts
I came into the class with almost zero maker experience beside one session on sewing that I took in Metropolis. I have never CADed or play with an Arduino board much less 3D print or design a circuit. Though there are many cool things out there to be make, I can't bring myself to make them because I am not sure I am able to. I hope HTMAA will change that.
As stated in pset 0, I'm an avid but very bad biker. If my hands go off of the bike handles, I will fall. Therefore, I cannot signal when turning which is quite dangerous considering Boston drivers. Instead of learning how to better balance on my bike, I will try to make a bike signal instead--something that may or may not be harder than just learning to balance.
Some sketches of the bike signal can be found in my pset 0. During embedded week, I attempted to make a circuit that would light up when it is after sunset--though I had to result to hardcoding for location and sunset time. I hope to incorporate steps to achieve the final project in each of the upcoming week.
A Change of Heart
Since first coming up with the initial final project idea, my biking skills as slowly improved to a point where I can now signal when turning (mostly because I keep thinking about this project while biking and testing how far I can take my hand off while riding). Since I now have no need for a bike signal, I have decided to do a Mancala board instead.
Mancala is a game that originated from Africa. I learned it when I was in elementary school in Vietnam. I was not particularly good at it, but it was very fun to play during recess. Taking inspiration from previous chess related project, I am thinking of making two boards that connect via wifi so that two people far away from each other can play.
Mobile versions of the game are not so great, and I think it will be nice to mill the board and cast the stones myself. Additionally, I found this very nice implementation of an AI mancala bot that could be a nice addition.
In week 8, I did an implementation of a capacitance sensor that will hopefully determine how many stones in one hole. I will still need to scale this up for all of the holes and determine empirically the value sensed with different numbers of stones.
I plan to mill a piece of wood to make the basic board, and cast the stones with dry stones or epoxy (maybe color them?). I'm still unsure about the placement of the capacitor, but that'll be a problem for 4 weeks from now.
Initial CAD
I made a basic CAD of the game without any electrical component.