> Functionality and Features

> The Pi Board is an advanced automated chess system powered by a Raspberry Pi, utilizing an XY stepper motor mechanism and magnets to move chess pieces seamlessly across the board. The development process involved several key stages, including precise calibration of stepper motor coordinates, calculating the weight of each piece for accurate handling, integrating a robust chess engine, and optimizing piece-grabbing strategies and movement detection. Special attention was given to selecting the most efficient algorithm to minimize the stepper motors' power consumption.

Is there a reason for the marketing speech? I'm assuming most people interested in this would rather read engineering speech, like so:

> The Pi Board, as the name suggests, uses a Raspberry Pi under the hood to calculate engine moves from <Stockfish? Leela Zero?>, and move the pieces with a series of stepper motors and magnets. We spent a significant amount of effort minimizing power consumption, including weighing the individual pieces to get more efficient grabbing and moving motions for each one.

Hate to be a spoil sport but if when pieces move they nudge other pieces out of the way and then those nudged pieces have to be put back by hand, then there’s still work left to be done. Same goes for capturing - the captured piece should walk itself off the board.

This brings back memories of Regium. A kickstarter scam 5 years ago that used realistic 3d animation videos of an automated chessboard to trick people out of their cash.

chess.com happily took regium's money to advertise their scam to their audience.

It eventually got kicked off kickstarter, and then kicked off some other kickstarter clones before self hosting their own kickstarter clone website. That was a wide ride. searching youtube for "regium chess board" will get a few hits.

Pi board looks like a fun project that I'm sure will be refined over the years.

Not sure if I missed it, but I didn't see any mention of how player moves are detected. Is there a camera and CV? It's always seemed like a fiddly problem to solve with electronics as you end up needing a matrix of sensors so there's a lot of wiring.

The movement of the knights is so creepy somehow. Lots of little movements and rotations. And then they just push a pawn out of the way and the human has to put it back.

I wonder if using two "arms" under the board would result in better movement - you'd need two motors to control the angle of each arm, and some way of extending the arms, but then you'd be able to use one arm to move any required pieces out of the way, while the other arm moves the intended piece around. You'd use a polar coordinate system, instead of a cartesian one, to keep track of where the arms are and where they need to move.

Plus, you'd be able to move the pieces off the board when they're captured.

1982

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITSXPdfxesU

http://www.chesscomputeruk.com/html/milton_bradley_phantom.h...

It really, really struggles to move the pieces. More development is needed.

Hey guys, I am Tamerlan the creator of this chess board. To answer some questions about the background noise its since I am working in my garage. Currently as a high schooler I don't have too much time to make improvements to the board such as having the piece automatically removed when captured, and an additional robotic arm underneath to move the pieces out of the way. I just decided to use an approach to move the pieces through the middle of the squares. Hopefully in the near future I will keep improving the pi board. Engineering has been my hobby for a while, since I like playing chess I decided to connect them two. I am not much of a web dev so the website is not the best, I made it to show the main idea of the concept, in the future I will improve the website as well and link it to all of my other projects I've built in the recent years. I would like to discuss with all of you more about the board, if you have any questions just shoot me an email at thstudios0708@gmail.com and we will get in touch! Thanks for all the support.

Cool project!

Could a hefty reverse magnetic pulse launch captured pieces off the board? And maybe with some precision by controlling the offset and power?

Really neat... very impressive work so far, so inspiring!

It's kinda funny to see just HOW MANY of these automated chess things exist... it's like people really do want the physical experience while still playing "with" someone. As I'm guessing OP will discover, the devil with this is in the details, and getting all of the last mile mechanics to work quite right is probably a huge pain to truly be able to seamlessly play against the opponent with the pieces moving automatically.

Surely the "actual" answer to this is some robotic arm with good enough camera work? All the things that make this hard -- the pieces not being placed perfectly, the knight jumping / or pieces that are being captured in really crowded places gets theoretically solvable with that approach. Of course then you have a huge issue with the engineering precision on the grabber and camera lol.

Maybe slimmer pieces would help prevent collisions during movement? (It is a pretty obvious suggestion, so likely there is a reason the author didn't take this approach. Is the lower bound of the piece's base determined by electromagnet strength?)

The fact that we have tinkerers building their own working versions of a well-known 1980s Brookstone novelty gadget makes me smile. Reminds me of the guys who built their own Segways back when we thought Segways were things people actually wanted.

I watched through all of that game play footage just to see if a castle would happen, and it did happen at the end, with the same bumpy movement that ran throughout the game.

The most interesting bit was probably near 1:50 where the pawn moved sideways.

Love this!

Also for those interested in auto-moving chess boards, see the Go Chess project:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gochess-most-powerful-che...

It takes a different approach: 1-4 "robots" under the board moving pieces around - with the goal of being able to reset the board or setup a position super-quick!

The issue with these "ghost chess" implementations are always the same things

1. How do captured pieces get removed? 2. How to handle pieces that move through other pieces (knights, castling)? 3. How to promote a pawn?

I have never seen these solved in something that is not awkward and neither seems to be the case here.

I've seen these kinds of chessboard automaton systems before, and they commonly struggle with complex movements, such as castling pieces, capturing, and the movement of knights.

A lot of them can't handle "contingent movements" where you need to displace piece X but in order to do so, you first have to displace piece Y, and then rewind the stack to restore the original pieces positions.

The second video where they demonstrate the actual gameplay footage exhibits some of these problems with this board, e.g. pieces that are displaced don't seem to re-center automatically, etc.

A real mechanical turk. Needs to be able to handle captures / castling too. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't see too much practical purpose for this, but as a piece of the scenery it could be very cool.

I love the board has no led when X the opponent. You can add LLMs as your opponent. So you can play with your dead grandpa, hitler, aristoteles while talking about everything. I'll buy or made one ! :D

Nice. Perhaps would be even better with a coil array and no moving parts.

So if there are challenges in moving the pieces from below, then why not have a robotic arm that reaches down and grabs and moves pieces? A bit of computer vision might help with accuracy.

Reminds me of squareoffnow[.]com. I've been wanting to get two boards for a while now and do remote play with friends.

Really cool!

Side note: there are some typos in the last header :P

hi, your website has spelling issues and also the contact text doesn't match up with the links?

"knight Movemetns and Casstle?"

How does it move the knight?

Switching a pawn to a queen is going to require some creativity :)

Interesting approach! I like how moves with pieces in the way were solved for the most part. A bit disappointing that the taken pieces have to be manually removed -- one way to handle that could have been to extend the range of the "head" to the margin of the board, and have it drag off the captured piece to that area before moving the capturing piece there.

I wonder if another mechanism altogether could work a bit better -- a matrix of electromagnets embedded under the board, with a resolution of say 1/4", so that when deployed in sequence, they could move the pieces from one magnetic field to another and another, without any actual moving parts involved.

1. e4 e5 2. d4 Bc5??

Call the exorcist...

Truly a mechanical turk