Play online chess with a real chess board

[oliv__]

Damn, this could be like the Peloton of Chess: an actual physical board that lets you play with people online. Would be pretty amazing.

I'm visualizing a board with magnetized pieces and your opponent's pieces would move on their own.

[Karunamon]

Theres an outfit called Square Off that has made literally this. They were about to deliver a 2nd gen version before covid hit and broke all the supply chains. Its still happening, but harshly delayed.

https://squareoffnow.com/

[perihelions]

There's already many solutions for *dedicated* chess boards with electronic outputs -- they're common in major tournaments. (I.e. capacitive sensors under the squares). The point of OP's solution (as I understand it) is anyone can use their own, ordinary boards for this, with no purchase, using standard cameras.

I think it's awesome.

(I think magnetized self-moving pieces exist too, but they're not very impressive. IIRC it's just one 2-dof magnet under the board. But that's slow and more for show than utility. It'd be a handicap for blitz).

[blentrop]

There's currently a project in Kickstarter doing just that

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wondersubstance/phantom...

[jgilias]

There's a satisfying symmetry in how a chessboard is used to do the chessboard calibration to actually play chess.

Nice work, thanks for sharing!

[alisonkisk]

What do you mean?

[syoc]

I thought this would be something similar to https://www.certabo.com/.

I think the combination of having a physical board but playing games over the internet is quite neat.

[app4soft]

Hardware chess computer is not a new idea.[0,1]

[0] https://www.chessprogramming.org/Dedicated_Chess_Computers

[1] https://www.chessprogramming.org/Millennium_ChessGenius

[Black101]

Video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTJb-r_LkyI&t=1m10s

[cakeplease]

I would be wary of using this to play online. I would assume chess.com/lichess anti-cheating algorithms would notice the robotic mouse pattern and eventually ban you.

[jacquesm]

Very cool this. Thank you for posting it.

Why do you call the white.jpg and black.jpg files 'exe' files?

They are binaries, images to be specific.

Edit: ah no, parsing error on my end, I get it now.

[varyherb]

A prime example of the confusion that arises when the Oxford comma is omitted

[kzrdude]

it's clearly a typo

[sireat]

This is a nice hacker alternative to professional product: https://www.digitalgametechnology.com/index.php/products/ele...

[DavideNL]

Windows only i assume?

Really cool, i often use a real chessboard when playing online just to “copy” the moves. looking forward to using this on macOS sometime in the future.

[gbolcer]

I like this. I'm going to try this out.

[barosl]

I expected this program would move the chess pieces by itself using a robotic arm or something. But, still great!

[eat_veggies]

James Stanley did that last year -- using magnets!

https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/autopatzer.html

[rexreed]

awesome -been wanting to do this for a while, and had an idea to build something like this to automatically record in-person chess tournaments for spectators.

[stOneskull]

cool stuff. i look forward to trying this.

[aj7]

A nice hack.