first
There's a lot of exciting stuff to talk about here, from 2 years of progress! I'll get to general updates later in this post, but first a recent success:
XNO LLC has officially filed its provisional patent for 4Play!
That means that the design is protected from here out, provided that XNO files its full utility patent in less than a year. This is really exciting, because it means I can share progress about the product and its software here without fear of imitators. The patent defines all the ways that 4Play is a unique device. This was pretty straightforward, because no one has made anything like it before. This was the first patent application for both me and XNO LLC, which was an exciting and educational process. With that out of the way, however, I'm able to focus on the product itself.
There's 3 main components of bringing up the prototype right now: mechanical design, electronics testing, and software development. All three are well underway.
The mechanical design is nearing completion as I work out what manufacturers I want to use for the parts (mostly the outer case) and finalize the design as I work with them. This part is somewhat reliant on the internal electronics, since part changes and required spacing drives some of the outer design, but it is largely independent. A rough sketch of the current design is shown in the "How 4Play Works" section. Most of the final changes are coming in the form of shifting screws around (or replacing them with snaps) and optimizing the case for manufacturing. When this wraps up in the near future, I plan to write a post detailing the history of the design and explaining some of the more interesting decisions made throughout the process.
Electronics testing is closely following the mechanical design. Test boards have already been shipped in from OSHPark (the beautiful purple ones in the header of the main page). The designs are promising (everything mechanically fits together and I haven't found any obvious errors), but more work needs to be done to test them out completely. Once these are fully brought up, I can use them to develop and test the software for the board, and finalize the board designs for the final product. The electronics for this product are relatively straightforward. The processor receives input from the buttons on the board or over Bluetooth®, and outputs the state of the board to the LEDs. Most of the magic happens inside the processor; all the boards need to do is power the processor, feed it input from the buttons, and display the specified board. With the modular design of the columns, this is relatively easy to achieve. Once it works, it works, and no future changes are anticipated, even as the software for the processor is updated.
Finally, the software development is a little scattered but promising. I've written working 4x4x4 games and player algorithms in a few languages now. I've also worked out a preliminary wireframe and base app code for the iPhone app. Finally, I've been researching and working to implement the best algorithms for playing the game. I need to reduce what initially took hours to run on my computer (for a single move) to seconds on the 100 times slower processor for 4Play. Between active development and external research, I've already seen incredible improvement, and I believe this level of speedup (~10,000 times) is entirely doable. Look forward to many future posts explaining the development of these algorithms and the functionality of both 4Play itself and the accompanying iPhone app!
I'm really excited to bring my favorite game to you. I'm currently working hard on all fronts, and I hope to have more updates out to you soon. For now, the provisional patent is out, preliminary design is done, and testing is starting to begin in earnest! I can't wait to show you how it turns out!