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.

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/

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).

if you have to move both sides of the board, i dont think this is really a solution for blitz anyways?

There's currently a project in Kickstarter doing just that

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

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!

What do you mean?

Camera calibrations are often done with a chess board pattern, as it shows scale, skew, rotation, etc of the real world plane you are imaging.

Also see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessboard_detection.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

it's clearly a typo

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

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.

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

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

James Stanley did that last year -- using magnets!

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

Thanks for this link. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Very inspiring.

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.

cool stuff. i look forward to trying this.

A nice hack.