Teach Your 3D Printer to Play Chess
Matthias Matousek converted a Creality Ender 3 printer into a chess playing robot using "only" string... and a few added electronics.
If you’ve been stuck at home for the last year or so, your 3D printer may have provided quite a bit of entertainment, enabling you to bring virtual models into the real world. On the other hand, at some point you may have run out of things to print, and wish that it could instead be used to play games. While this might seem like a ridiculous request, Matthias Matousek was able to do just that, using “only” a piece of string and parts produced by his Creality Ender 3 printer.
In reality, he also needed a webcam and a Raspberry Pi running OctoPrint, along with an external laptop. The laptop runs a computer vision routine that his wife wrote to recognize the human player’s moves, allowing it to use an open source chess AI to determine the printer’s strategy. It then sends the proper movement commands to the printer via the Pi/OctoPrint, causing it to beat Matousek until he reprograms it for “ease of use.”
The chess pieces are printed in a squarish “Bauhaus” style, making them easy for the custom gripper assembly to pick up. The string is connected to the extruder motor, and used to pull the gripper closed. So his initial claim of needing "only" a string isn't too far off, considering the extra electronics amount to a fairly standard OctoPrint setup.
If you want to make your own printer chess player, models and code are available on GitHub. Matousek is even considering making an actual OctoPrint plugin for this setup, which would likely make things quite straightforward.