Smart Digital Chessboard

Summary

This project will be done together with my friend @fellu4485. We are building two boards together.

We are passionate about chess and have started learning electronics in school. We have been programming for about two years and want to take our skills to the next level. We are building two smart chessboards with the ability to play online with each other or against an AI. It detects the moves with hall magnet sensors and magnets mounted in the pieces. The boards highlight the moves of the AI with LEDs and you just have to move the pieces. It also has a screen to display useful information like time, screen for selecting AI difficulty, etc.

Plan

Tools we are going to use:

• 3D-printer (already owned)
• Hot Glue gun (already owned)
• Soldering iron
• Dremel (already owned)
• SD-card reader (already owned)
• Misc tools (already owned)

Steps we are going to take:

1. We will model and 3D-print the boards themselves and two sets of pieces.
2. We mount a LED strip and hall magnet sensors to the inside of each board in a way that every square has a led and a magnet sensor under it. The magnet sensor will detect if a piece is on the square with the help of a magnet mounted on the bottom of the chess piece. The LEDs will be used as indicators for the AI’s next move and have other cool effects.
3. All the 64 magnet sensors won’t fit into the pins of the Arduino-like microcontroller so we will have some multiplexers as middlemen between the microcontroller and the magnet sensors.
4. Next we install the Arduino-like microcontrollers to the boards and link them to the multiplexers, switches and rotary encoders. The microcontrollers will handle all sensors and inputs.
5. After that we will install the Raspberry pis to the boards and connect them to the screens and microcontrollers. The Raspberry pis will work as the brains of the boards. They will handle connecting to the internet in order to play online matches and run Stockfish for offline play against an AI. The pis will also be responsible for rendering images and communicating with the microcontroller.
6. As the next step we will mount a USB C to dip adapters on the side of the boards. At this point we can power everything for example by connecting a power bank to the port.
7. The final step for us will be to install SD-cards to the Raspberry pis and program the pi to display gamemode select, AI difficulty chooser, time and recent moves on the screen. We will need to also program it to transmit information with the microcontroller about the position of the pieces and the colours of the LEDs. Also we will integrate online play and Stockfish.

Budget