OPENCHESSBOARD: An open-source smart chess board for lichess

Spending lot of time at home during the pandemic and staring at the computer screen I thought about a different way to play online chess. From the idea of the most intuitive smart smart chess board without buttons I wanted to create a simple and straight forward physical chess board to play online chess. No setup procedure, no additional proprietary app, just power it up and start playing against people online.

This project evolved over the past years, from DIY project

to be an open-source development platform for building your own chess board

as well as a fully working product keeping the original spirit alive. Reduced to the minimum, just play chess online with a physical chess board. Check it out in this video.

You can view the schematics here!

C

Currently the firmware allows for WiFi play as standalone device or connects via BLE to the Blichess app in your phone.

And since it is an open platform you could also build funny stuff like a step-sequencer, check the video here.

If this projects somehow gets a few likes here, I will create a more detailed post explaining all the details in the hardware and software as this is intended as a baseline for building your own projects, ideas or what ever you can imagine to happen on a chess board as iot device.