Mechanical Design

For the mechanical design of the game board, we decided to use a modular design which involves first designing and testing a single cell. Once the design for one cell is complete, duplicates are created and assembled together to build the full 6x6 game board with 36 total cells. This design is advantageous because it is easy to assemble and resize depending on what dimensions of Connect-Four™ users want to play. Also, the board can be expanded or shrunken in dimensions to play connect-n. Each cell is a full enclosure with a removable lid that can house the LED PCB, the laser cut acrylic, and metal pins to connect to other cells. Also, each cell has the necessary openings for cell-to-cell wire connections and for users to see the lit up acrylic.

Board Assembly & 3D Cell Model

To bring our modular vision into reality, 3D printing was the most viable option. Designing the cell components was no easy task as no two 3D printed cells would yield the same dimensions and print quality. The problem of combining the components into a 6x6 square while maintaining integrity further proved to be a challenge. To solve this, we implemented a design that housed eight holes for half-inch sized metal dowels as a means to hold everything together on every square of each cell.

Cells Printing...

1 x 2 Cell Configuration

1 x 2 Cell Configuration Illuminated

6 x 6 Cell Configuration

Acrylic Design

Our acrylic was laser-cut to easily combine with the cell design to sustain a perfect friction fit. This is housed inside the cells to consistently disperse the LED’s illumination to make the game visually appealing and vibrant to play!

(Logo Design: Each face of the logo represents an element of our project. The binary numbers on the left face of cube stand for “EEE C4”, EE-Emerge Connect-4! The right face is circuit symbols to represent the hardware design that went to this project. The upper face of the logo is a button representing thse user input of our project.)

Stand Construction

Prototyping with a simple 2 x 2 mini-design, a triangular stand was chosen for optimal stabilization with safety in mind. The double-sided nature of this design was prioritized to emulated the traditional Connect-Four™ game. For the final design, black spray-painted quarter-inch plywood was used to completely reinforce the weight of our full design while maintaining the electrical connections.