A Beautiful Homemade Chess Robot

While a computer does a great job of simulating chess and other board games, one thing it has a difficult time with is physically moving pieces in real life. To accomplish that, you’ll need to come up with a clever electro-mechanical design, which hacker RoboAvatar accomplished beautifully with his Homemade Chess Robot seen here.

His design uses a gantry system with X, Y, and Z axes, similar to the mechanisms used in a CNC router. Instead of a cutter, this bot has a gripper mechanism, which allows it to pick up a piece and move it to the needed position. To sense the human participant’s moves, a system of 64 reed switches is used to sense magnets attached to each piece, sending data to an Arduino Uno for control. While this eliminates the need for a complicated vision system, using this many I/O meant implementing a multiplexer shield, as well as two MCP23017 ICs to accommodate all of the switches.

While an Arduino Uno controls board movements, the chess program itself is written in Python and runs on an actual computer. Code for both is available on GitHub. You can see a demonstration of gameplay in the first video below, or how the game was actually made in the second, including an explanation of how the gaming algorithm works around 5:30.