Soldering Assignment

Description

The soldering assignment is a basic soldering exercise that ensures all ECE 445/ME 470 students understand how to solder surface-mount and through-hole devices. Students will be provided with the necessary PCB, components, solder, flux, etc. The details of the soldering assignment can be found in the assignment sheet.

Your end product should look similar to the following. You will create a small device that blinks an LED at varying frequencies when the button is pressed, based on a potentiometer reading.

Soldering Assignment Image

Below is a series of soldering tutorials. The critical ingredient that you need to make your life easier while surface mount soldering (and through-hole too) is flux. There is liquid, water-soluble flux available in the lab. If you can't find it or don't know what it looks like, ask a lab staff member or TA for help.

Requirements and Grading

The soldering assignment is worth 10 points and is graded via inspection by a TA or Lab Staff member. Students are allowed to make as many attempts as necessary to complete the assignment.

Submission and Deadlines

The soldered PCB must be presented to a course staff member before the deadline listed on the Course Calendar.

Video Tutorials

Below are a few public video tutorials on Soldering. There is also a text description of how to solder on the soldering assignment doc linked above.

Through-hole (THT) and surface-mount (SMD) soldering tutorial:

Tutorial on using the various types of flux:

Tutorial on using wick to remove solder:

Tutorial on using a heat gun:

Intelligent Texas Hold 'Em Robot

Xuming Chen, Jingshu Li, Yiwei Wang, Tong Xu

Featured Project

## Problem

Due to the severe pandemic of COVID-19, people around the world have to keep a safe social distance and to avoid big parties. As one of famous Poker games in the western world, the Texas Hold’em is also influenced by the pandemic and tends to turn to online game platform, which, unfortunately, brings much less real excites and fun to its players. We hope to develop a product to assist Poker players to get rid of the limit of time and space, trying to let them enjoy card games just as before the pandemic.

## Solution Overview

Our solution is to develop an Intelligent Texas Hold’em robot, which can make decisions in real Texas poker games. The robot is expected to play as an independent real player and make decisions in game. It means the robot should be capable of getting the information of public cards and hole cards and making the best possible decisions for betting to get as many chips as possible.

## Solution Components

-A Decision Model Based on Multilayer Neural Network

-A Texas Hold'em simulation model which based on traditional probabilistic models used for generating training data which are used for training the decision model

-A module of computer vision enabling game AI to recognize different faces and suits of cards and to identify the game situation on the table.

-A manipulation robot hand which is able to pick, hold and rotate cards.

-Several Cameras helping to movement of robot hand and the location of cards.

## Criterion for Success

- Training a decision model for betting using deep learning techniques (mainly reinforcement learning).

- Using cv technology to transform the information of public cards and hole cards and the chips of other players to valid input to the decision-making model.

- Using speech recognition technology to recognize other players’ actions for betting as valid input to the decision model.

Using the PTZ to realize the movement of the cameras which are used to capture the information of pokers and chips.

- Finish the mechanical design of an interactive robot, which includes actions like draw cards, move cards to camera, move chips and so on. Utilize MCU to control the robot.

Project Videos