Why did we choose this project:
Before choosing our current project, we wanted to make a robotic arm that could play video games. Unfortunately, it was way too complicated for us to create with our current skills. Therefore, we decided to do a passion project on a more simple game, Tic Tac Toe.
This passion project was meaningful to us because we wanted to explore the limitations of robot arms and learn how to add code to the robot arms. We thought that this was interesting for both me and my partner because we always wanted to add code to a robotic arm, and make one that would actually work.
My personal goal is to create a robotic arm using Tinker cad (3D programming software). I also wanted to make people start playing Tic Tac Toe again since it hasn’t been played or talked about in a long period of time.
Tic Tac Toe piece and board:
The project progress (middle):
We weren’t able to move the robotic arm during this period, but we were getting closer, and closer to do so. We tried using raspberry pi 4 that I own, but there wasn’t enough ram on the minicomputer . Therefore, we decided to buy a raspberry pi 5 computer, which was one hundred dollars. It was expensive, but for the sake of our project it was a worthy sacrifice. We did a bunch of trial and erroring on the robotic arm, and also wiring the robotic arm. We were able to gather most of the resources necessary to complete the robot arm.
Here is the completed Tic Tac Toe board, and robotic arm:
Funny fail of robotic arm:
For some reason, the robotic arm twitches every time it starts moving. This is because our Raspberry pi 5 mini computer does not pair well with our operating system, Ubuntu. Fortunately, this was an easy fix. We were able to fix all the twitching by adding PWM (Pulse-width modulation) to our raspberry pi. This made the robotic arm’s movement much smoother, and it would no longer shake anymore.
The end of our passion project:
After five months of hard work that me and my partner put in , we finally completed our tic tac toe robot. Here’s the thing, we didn’t finish our posterboard just yet since we spent most of our time on getting the robotic arm to work. Getting the robotic arm to work was difficult to do, but making sure the code was even harder.
In order for the robotic arm to receive an input, we had to make color recognition on scratch and add an AI that pairs with our scratch code. Making color recognition on scratch is more difficult than it sounds because of the color that we printed our pieces in. The color value of our pieces would over fluctuate due to the lighting of our room.
the robotic arm’s code work with our color recognition was pain, but I was able to code a simple auto hotkey code where it receives the input from color recognition, and then sends an input to the robotic arm. The input is from 1-9, which is the squares on our tic tac toe bot. Let’s just hope that we do well in the STEAM fair, and the robot arm wouldn’t cheat, which is when the robot arm places a piece on top of another piece to win.
Here is some of the parts for the Tic Tac Toe project:
The image on the left show the robotic arm, Tic Tac Toe pieces, board, and the camera attached to the cardboard with hot glue, a lot of hot glue. On the other image, it displays the raspberry pi 5 wired to the PWM, which is short for Pulse-width modulator.
Our Posterboard:
Our posterboard consists of 11 sections, and 5 photos of our project. Some of the sections include the introduction, how the robotic arm works, why we chose this project and more. Using Cricut, we were able to create and design our one and only title: Tic Tac Toe bot. The design I created was inspired by a random image I found online.
For some reason, everyone that came to the STEAM fair didn’t bother looking at our posterboard. Instead, their attention were dragged by our robotic arm playing a game of Tic Tac Toe. Honestly, it would of been better if they didn’t look at the posterboard anyways because there would be less information to present to them.
Group photo:
YES SIR!!!!