Summary
- Pi 5-driven wooden chessboard mirrors bot moves with magnets and tracks your moves.
- Hardware: Pico SKR, CoreXY electromagnet, 64 Hall sensors, 5″ LCD; runs Stockfish, Maia3, Rodent IV, Patricia.
- Saves games in PGN and plans Lichess/Chess.com sync for mirrored online play; code not yet released.
Playing chess digitally, either versus a bot or a player, is always a great way to get some practice in and learn some strategies. But there’s something about a physical chessboard that just feels right, you know? It’s like owning a physical version of a book, a CD for your album, or the game box for your fave title.
If you want the best of both worlds, someone has figured out a way to mirror a bot’s moves to a physical chessboard using a Raspberry Pi 5. Best of all, support for online play is in the works.
This Raspberry Pi 5 chessboard is all style with all the convenience
No need to sacrifice anything
Over on the Raspberry Pi subreddit, user Refeying showed off their automatic chessboard. It uses magnets to move pieces around and registers your own movements. It even cleanly shunts a piece to the side when capturing it for an easier time removing it from the board.
Here’s how the creator describes their project:
The Pi is connected with a Pico SKR V1.0 controlling a CoreXY System with an electromagnet. Additionally to 64 omnidirectional hall sensors on 8 custom PCBs via pin header and IO-Expander. Some momentary push buttons, a 5″ LCD-Display and Status-LEDs on the side-walls as well.
Currently Stockfish, Maia3, Rodent IV and Patricia run it.
Refeying says that ongoing games are saved in Portable Game Notation (PGN) format. This means that the board can recall the state of the game when it’s turned off. In the future, they hope to get Lichess and Chess.com APIs working with it; this would let them play people online, where moves are mirrored between the virtual board and the real one.
Refeying hasn’t released the source code or schematics, but I truly hope they consider it once this project is feature-complete. It’d be amazing to make something like this at home and play against people online with real pieces.
Related
This ESP32-powered split-flap chess board is the coolest way to play the classic game
Also the loudest.