Wizard's Chess
Principles of Engineering - Fall 2014
Principles of Engineering is a required class for all Olin students, in which teams of 5 students design and make a system with integrated mechanical, electrical, and software systems. This is usually students' first experience with integrated design.
My team consisted of 5 sophomores, and we designed a version of Wizard's Chess, a la the Harry Potter series. Our overarching goal was to make a game of chess that could be played without touching the pieces.
I led the mechanical subteam. We used a two-axis, belt-actuated gantry to move an electromagnet under the board. The pieces had magnets embedded in them, so pieces moved with the electromagnet when it was turned on and moved.
The gantry was powered by two stepper motors, run with an arduino, connected with python through pyserial, and voice-controlled using google's speech API.
The website for our project can be found at poe.olin.edu/poe2014/knights.