A Very Impressive DIY Robotic Chess Board

From the infamous Mechanical Turk to IBM’s Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov, chess has a long history of inspiring technological development. Overlapping interests certainly factor into it, but it likely has something to do with the complexity of chess and how that creates intriguing engineering challenges. Tamerlan Goglichidze certainly encountered and overcame those challenges when he developed this impressive DIY robotic chess board.

Goglichidze’s PI BOARD looks like a conventional chess board when viewed from the top, but underneath there is a robot capable of moving the pieces. The robot can move any piece from any position on the board to any other valid position, so it can play as either color. In theory, it could even play both sides. The human player can either compete against the robot directly, or they can compete with other human players over the internet as the robot moves the opponent’s pieces.

We have seen similar chess boards in the past, but Goglichidze was able to achieve this with a modest budget. He also wrote a build log that covers some of the challenges he came across and his solutions, which is an interesting read.

As the name implies, PI BOARD takes advantage of a Raspberry Pi. Goglichidze used an Arduino development board during the early prototyping stages, then switched to the Raspberry Pi SBC (Single-Board Computer). The Raspberry Pi has enough processing power to run the chess engine and calculate moves — and, importantly, the paths for those moves.

The robot itself most closely resembles a CNC pen plotter. It moves a carriage in the X and Y axes, and lifts a magnet vertically in the Z axis. Goglichidze originally wanted to use an electromagnet to eliminate the need for the Z axis, but found that it was slow to reverse polarity and had trouble reliably releasing pieces. With actuation in the Z axis, the robot can move the magnet straight down to release pieces.

That worked well for most movements, but there were two situations that required special care: knight moves and castling. In both cases, pieces may need to move along paths that aren’t open. It would be possible to first shift obstructing pieces out of the way and then back, but that would be inefficient. That is how Goglichidze handled Castling, which is relatively uncommon. But for knight movements, he implemented a sort of “half-step” strategy, which lets the knight squeeze past other pieces (nudging them slightly).

We’ve barely scratched the surface of this project and the chess board is awesome to see in action, so be sure to take a look at Goglichidze’s build log.