Schlagwort: Automated Chessboard

  • Practical magnetic switches make this electronic chessboard possible

    Practical magnetic switches make this electronic chessboard possible

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    You can play chess just as easily on a $2 set from a thrift store as you can on a $2,000 ornate set from a bespoke retailer. But that doesn’t stop people from building or buying those fancy chess sets. If you’re the DIY type, you may even be interested in an electronic chessboard like this one from the NVE Corporation team, which was made possible by practical magnetic switches.

    This is an electronic chessboard that registers moves and speaks them out loud. That can make it useful for people who don’t have good eyesight. It also allows for the possibility of recording entire matches on a connected computer. Chessboards like this aren’t uncommon, but this project was simplified by the use NVE’s GMR magnetic switch sensors. Those detect the presence of magnets in the bases of the chess pieces, with enough tolerance to account for variation in placement and board thickness.

    An Arduino UNO R3 board monitors all 64 of those switches through a matrix similar to keyboard. When a player picks up a piece, the Arduino notes the square that changed states. Then, when the player puts down the piece, the Arduino records that square, too. It can then output PWM (pulse-width modulation) audio to an amplifier board that says, for example, “B7 to B6” using the Talkie library.

    By updating a running log of every piece’s position, it would also be possible for it to instead say “pawn to B6.” But the current implementation doesn’t do so.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il0iVUDDfjk?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    The post Practical magnetic switches make this electronic chessboard possible appeared first on Arduino Blog.

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  • This illuminated chessboard displays possible moves

    This illuminated chessboard displays possible moves

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    Chess is a tricky game to learn, even before you get into various strategies and tactics. The simple act of memorizing the different piece’s moves can be overwhelming to people new to the game. To make it easy to determine where pieces can go, Redditor Bakedbananas is building an illuminated chess board that displays a player’s possible moves.

    This is still a work in progress, but the short video does a great job of demonstrating the concept. The entire board is lit from underneath and normally shows the standard checkered pattern. But when a person lifts up a piece, the surrounding squares change color to indicate where the player can place that piece. The starting square is yellow, and squares the piece can move to are green. Red squares indicate positions that a piece would normally be able to go, but which are blocked by other pieces.

    Bakedbananas hasn’t posted many technical details yet, but some information is available. The pieces and board, including the translucent squares, are 3D-printed. An Arduino Mega 2560 board detects the presence of pieces on squares using Reed switches and magnets in the pieces’ bases. But the Arduino cannot identify each unique piece. For that reason, it must track every piece’s movement from its starting position in order to keep a running record of the type of piece located at each square.

    Made some progress on the Chessboard this week
    by u/Bakedbananas in arduino

    There is still a lot of work required to finish this project, but it is very promising and we can’t wait to see the final result in action!

    The post This illuminated chessboard displays possible moves appeared first on Arduino Blog.

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  • This special chessboard brings digital opponents into the physical world

    This special chessboard brings digital opponents into the physical world

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    Arduino Team — March 3rd, 2022

    Chess still remains an extremely popular game but finding someone to play against can be a struggle, especially when it’s done in-person instead of through a screen. Greg06 on Instructables has created an automated chessboard that can not only tell where specific pieces are moved, but also play against a live human opponent intelligently while moving its own pieces. 

    At the base of the gameboard is a two-axis gantry system, which is responsible for moving the chess pieces positioned above via an electromagnet. And rather than placing one stepper motor on each axis, the gantry takes advantage of the CoreXY concept which can move the magnet in all directions with a complex arrangement of pulleys, belts, and two stationary stepper motors. Controlling this is a single Arduino Nano connected to a pair of A4988 drivers, a MOSFET for driving the magnet, and two limit switches for homing.

    The game is able to determine which piece was moved and to which specific grid square via an 8×8 matrix of reed switches that close a circuit whenever there is a magnet nearby. To save on GPIO pins, four multiplexers were added in order to take the 64 incoming values from the switches and convert it into a single 6-bit value. Finally, a 16×2 character LCD was included for providing instructions/menus to the player(s).

    The entire system works by running several iterations of a chess minimax algorithm that attempts to select the optimal move given the current state of the board. To see it in action, you can watch Greg’s demo’s video below or read more about the project here on Instructables. 

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  • No opponent nearby? Not a problem! This automatic chessboard lets you play others remotely

    No opponent nearby? Not a problem! This automatic chessboard lets you play others remotely

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    Arduino Team — June 10th, 2021

    Chess is an excellent game to play with friends, but what if you don’t have any to compete against nearby? This is what prompted maker Carlos Pendas to create an automatic chessboard that’s not only able to record which pieces got moved, but even move the pieces itself. This means you can play a game of physical chess with someone thousands of miles away. 

    To begin, Pendas started out by designing and milling his own chess pieces with a special cutout underneath to hold both a weight and a magnet. The magnet is vital here as it’s what gets detected by the array of 500 Hall effect sensors underneath the board and moved by the articulating arm. After a player makes their move, an Arduino Nano reads which Hall sensors were activated and in what order to determine the piece moved. This data is then relayed to a Nano 33 IoT that communicates with a Lichess server to send movement and general game commands. 

    Once the remote player makes their move, a command is sent to an ESP32 that controls a robotic arm with an electromagnet placed on the end. It precisely maneuvers each piece to avoid collisions and keep the board looking tidy. 

    Chess GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

    You can read more about how the automatic chessboard was built on Pendas’ Hackaday.io project page.

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