In the second day of lab we talked through prototyping ideas, outlined code and ordered materials. We started with talking through how we wanted the board to look and how to maneuver through it. Some options were force sensors or buttons on each tile or two potentiometers one for vertical and the other for horizontal navigation paired with a button to place a tile. We decided to go with the potentiometer option as there is limited inputs in the Arduino. Next we decided to use an 8 by 8 grid of neopixels for the board itself. We then started researching the code. Pretty quickly we realized we needed a special library to work with the neopixels. We tried multiple ones out and found one that would allow the entire board to be one large matrix so we stuck with that one. Next, we talked about the basic outline of the code. Some challenges we knew we were going to run into was the flipping of the board pieces especially in the diagonal direction and having the piece that was in play switch colors depending on who’s turn it was. Finally, we went through and added the neopixels to the order form so we could begin to create the board.

Here are some pictures of our initial coding outline: