Help with a project

I want to make a go board that can record a game that is played upon it. If I can make the buttons light up inorder to replay a game that would be a huge boost.

Kerry

I'd suggest locating a used electronics store. Junk electronics often includes old keyboards (and some not so old...) from which lots of switches can be had for cheap.

Another place to check is electronics parts suppliers... catalogs, online, &c. Can buy buttons with switches & caps in bulk - that way you get units that are all alike

Gots to figure a way to mount the buttons. This depends on what you find in step 1, when you've got them in hand then you can work on this... maybe as simple as a piece of wood or fiberboard or aluminum sheet and drill 360 holes in it, into which you snap your switch bodies

Remember if you turn a sheet of anything into a lace card by drilling

360 holes thru it, it'll wobble, will need reinforcing ribs or standoffs

Then on the back you can solder wires/components to the contacts

A frame around the board, amenities like that always cheer up professors immeasurably It's like you care and all

Then you're going to need a processor - a personal computer? a built in unit like a 8051 or something you can develop a program for? If it can actually play the game that'll drop some jaws

Be sure to evaluate the need and the enthusiasm and the determination These things tend to drag out past estimates... usual rule of thumb is to double your estimate, but lately we've been seeing this needs to be doubled again. Maybe space time is warping or something

If you can find a really enthusiastic lab partner it's a plus... one who will sit up nights rewiring while you do the snoring

Well, 360 buttons and someplace to put them, for a start. ;-) The electronics won't be hard at all: 23 line drivers and 16 input bits, and scan them. Maybe

360 diodes, just so you don't short your line drivers to each other in a "rollover" condition.

The line drivers can be decoded from 5 bits of output port, or you could use a high-pin-count micro, and just use I/O pins.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Good Luck! Rich

I don't recall the size of the matrix, but how about one of those old electronic Battleship games? May be able to pick one up at a yard sale for cheap.

Richard Seriani

Wel, first, you're probably gonna need a whole lot of buttons....

What, exactly, is it you're trying to achieve here?

Bob M.

You could do it by having a board with a round hole at the bottom of each square, and a photodetector underneath it, so when the piece was in place it blocked out the light and the detector registers it. This would mean more electronics though.

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4 second-hand pc's with 104-key keyboards, a LAN, and some software :)

what sort of time and spacial resolution do you need?

Bye. Jasen

only 10x10 or so and it wasn't electrified

X and Y were input in sequence using buttons disguised as sliders.

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Bye.
   Jasen

For a GO board, you'll need 361 switches (or whatever). 19X19 should be trivial to scan[1]; it appears that the sticking point is on the switches themselves.

Just put 361 little depressions on the board, each of which holds a stone, and each of which has two bare metal contacts, and make your stones of steel and brass. ;-)

Or two photodiodes, with different spectral responses, and stones made of material that's a narrow-band filter at the wavelength of one or the other. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

[1] well, trivial for a guy who's been programming microprocessors for a few years. ;-)

interject.... at LEAST doubled. I have recently done my first project that integrated EE stuff with my usual ME projects...and developing and running optimization code (it's a thermal dissipation from a small volume of an IC generating 5W) for the thermal management took 4 times longer than our original estimate...with a 36 hour long no-stop push at the deadline. i have just recently woken up from about an 18 hour nap :) but the project's done. strange, my mechanical projects usually run over cost by 2x and over time by 1.5x..but this went far over that. Of course, if I'd had more experience going into it with the electronic end of things it may not have taken 4X the estimate...but I was lead on this and we were 3 ME's working on a project with a large electrical engineering component. Tells me i need to brush up on my electrical theory, pretty much. regards, Karinne

Maybe space time is warping or something

Sorry, forget that - it wouldn't distinguish between white and black pieces

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In that case, just having switches isn't going to cut it for you

- you will also need some way to distinguish the black/white pieces. This sounds like far more trouble than it's going to be worth, vs. just writing yourself a "Go-recording" program and playing the game on a PC screen.

Unless you're going to be willing to get into some somewhat sophisticated photosensors, with light sources, you won't be able to use the color of the pieces as the distinguishing feature - perhaps you might be able to make the pieces different shapes, with an additional switch triggered by, say, the black piece that ISN'T triggered by the white. But again, this just seems like a massive amount of work for little return.

Bob M.

Bob M.

Thanks for all the advice. The order that stones are played in tells me the color, ie black must play first. There is a problem if the players are of different rank, because then black may play several stones before white begins. I'd like to have a switch that lets me tell the machine "all these stones are black handicap stones", and then just turn it off for the last black stone played. Software exists to do all the things I want and more on a computer, but tournaments are usually played on real boards, and writing down moves while playing results in worse play, as games are timed.

probably the easist (and cheapest) way to make the switch matrix is to use a membrane matrix. you could fashion your own unsing that conductive window tape used for alarms, (or al-foil etc), on polycarbonate (or similar non-elastic plastic) sheets with mask between the sheets to separate them.

On the down side a setup like this can only reliably detetrmine two simultaneous contacts between the sheets, so the top sheet would need to be stiff enough to support the stone without sagging into contact with the lower sheet, and the playes would have to press their pieces down when placing them. many computerised chessboards work on a similar principle.

possilby a double-layer matrix could be used to reduce the pincount

another option would be to mount a "webcam" like device above the board and use image-processing software to detect the changes. filtering out the images showing the player's hand.

Bye. Jasen

If all you need is a record of the games, why not just videotape it? :-)

Good Luck! Rich