Automaters of Catan

Inspiration

Our team enjoys playing the classic Catan board game in our free time. We enjoy the faster pace of the online game, as well as not having to worry about distributing resources each roll. Even with this, we still play the normal board game because it seems more personal and often leads to more involved players. Our idea was to build a standalone product that combines the best aspects of both worlds. A physical game that is automated to take care of the redundant processes for you. The idea was to make this a standalone product that doesn't rely on the users' personal devices, as we wanted a clear separation between our product and the online games.

What it does

The board will randomly generate the board for each game, indicating the resource of each tile with LED's and the dice value of each tile. The game consists of a large screen for all players to read and displays common information such as the dice roll, resource cards available, and the turn number. There is also individual screens for each player to privately control all of their actions in the game. Lastly there is a camera that will read when pieces are placed on the board, and keep track of necessary information associated with those placements.

How we built it

We built this project by leveraging tools like OpenAI's codex to build a large bulk of the game logic. This game logic was then implemented onto a Raspberry Pi 3 platform. Due to the large amount of lights, screens, and other peripherals this project took advantage of, we also needed two Pi pico's All 3D printed parts were designed in SolidWorks, then printed using the onsite printers available.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was how time consuming it was to repeatedly wire each tile and component. Although we purchased the materials and had the inspiration prior to the hackathon, all work was done on site, so realizing that almost 500 soldered connections were needed to build the entire board meant we needed to adjust our plan. Instead of building the entire board, our team focused on building at least one of each component, in order to have the functioning code as well as prove each aspect of the design was feasible. Additionally, we had a few pieces of hardware go bad during the hackathon, so we had to pivot towards other products in order to put forth the best design we could.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the fact that despite the difficulties, we were able to build a product that shows each aspect of our initial idea working together seamlessly. The user interface works very well, which was a huge win for us, since the user experience was the reason for this project.

What we learned

This project provided invaluable experience with working between different types of hardware and software. The challenges we faced forced us to think on our feet and make adjustments to our plan, all skills that will be useful in the workforce.