The Beginning:

Why we chose this project:

You may be wondering, how did we think of this idea of making a tic-tac-toe robot?  Well, one day our teacher introduced us to a passion project and said that our project should connect to our interests.  We both like games and computers.  So, after talking for a while, we came up with the thought of trying to attempt to make a robotic arm that could play some physical games, such as card games, board games, and other games. However, we realized that focusing on multiple games for a first attempt at this would likely be way too complex for our skill level.  As we were trying to adapt our idea, the grade 11 STEAM students came to showcase their own passion projects. One of the passion projects that caught our attention was a passion project on Chess using robotics.  This led us towards the idea of making a tic-tac-toe board game using robotics and officially started our passion project journey.   

Funny thing that happened:

While I was coding the robotic arm, it just started to spin for no apparent reason!  The wires ended up getting all tangled.  This never happened again and it still confuses me.

Middle of project:

Even with much effort and time, the progress towards our ultimate end goal of playing a full game was not very good half way through the project.  The program was able to recognize the tic tac toe pieces using a camera, but the rest of project steps needed wouldn’t work.  We ended up changing the coding methods and languages many times and eventually had some success.

Funny things that happened:

The robot arm, due to how we were controlling the servos, would jitter a lot.  This is called servo jitter and is caused by inconsistent signals being sent to the servos.  Sometimes it would jitter so much it would throw pieces across the board!  We fixed this problem by buying a PWM (Pulse width modulation) module.  This keeps the signals to the servos consistent, removing the jitter.

The end of the project:

After many months of troubleshooting and experimenting, my partner and I were finally able to put something together that worked.  Our tic tac toe bot  project still has many bugs and issues, but overall we are happy with the results as we were successfully able to play a full tic tac toe game.  Throughout this experience, both my partner and I learned key coding skills, many things about image and colour detection, and about automating things using computers.

What we could improve upon:

There are many ways we could improve our tic tac toe bot.  For example, due to the project being made of cardboard, and the weight of the robot arm, the arm eventually tore itself off the base.  I could fix this by using wood, or by 3d printing the base.  Another thing I could improve is increasing the accuracy of the camera by trying different coding language.  Sometimes the program detects the wrong piece, and this causes the robot to cheat by placing one of its pieces over top of one of the human’s pieces.