Goal of the project¶
Smart chessboards are popular DIY projects for hardware and software enthusiasts. One great advantage of a DIY chess board project is that lot of resources are available to assist people with the hardware design. This makes the project accessible to people of any skill level. Unfortunately, there are few resources to assist people in the software design. Most projects only treat the software as an after thought and very few features are implemented. This project aims to change that. This software project contains a concise and well documented software framework for a DIY chessboard. The framework contains out of the box functionality which allows players to connect the board to chess.com or to play against an engine. The software works with any hardware setup and is accessible to people of any skill level. No software development or Python experience is needed. Next to this the project is easily extendable so new ideas can easily be implemented. This documentation will guide you trough all steps needed to connect your chessboard. Next to this the inner structure of software is also well documented. The documentation of the inner software is only needed if you are planning to implement new features. If you implement any features worth sharing please share them with the community.
Project requirements¶
The project has been designed to be usable for any hardware setup. The only requirement is that the controller (the device running the code) supports python. The software can be pulled from github:
git clone https://github.com/WouterSchols/SmartChessboard.git
All Python dependencies for the project can then be installed by calling pip from the root directory.:
cd SmartChessboard
pip install .
The hardware of the project will need to be linked with this software project. This can be done by implementing
the HardwareInterface. Detailed instructions and the interface specification
can be found here here.
There are various ways to play on the hardware. We call these options to play against the hardware clients. Some clients require some small extra dependencies. In order to play on chess.com one will also need to download the chrome driver. The chrome driver is a version of the chrome browser which can be controlled using software. I have created the project on a Raspberry pi 3B+, chrome driver for the raspberry pi can be downloaded using the command:
sudo apt-get install chromium-chromedriver
A second client is the engine client. This client allows you to play against an engine. This client works with any installed engine. The most commonly used engine is stockfish. On the Raspberry Pi the software can be installed using the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
cd Stockfish/src
sudo make -j4 profile-build ARCH=armv7
This will fetch the latest version of stockfish and compile it to be efficient on the hardware.