Now You’re Playing with Power
Taser Chess will make you a better chess player — even if it has to give you a jolt with a nerve stimulation device to whip you into shape!
Some people are quick to take the advice of those with more experience to learn a new skill, but others seem to have to learn the hard way. If you are in the latter category and just need to get your hands dirty to learn through personal experience, YouTuber Everything Is Hacked has a solution that might be of use to you. Or you might absolutely hate it — it is probably a toss-up, really.
But in any case, if you have been trying to learn chess and have not been able to get the feel of the game, Everything Is Hacked’s Taser Chess might be helpful. But if not, it will definitely be amusing at a minimum. As the name implies, Taser Chess is a custom chess game that doles out electrical shocks. Of course it does not indiscriminately shock the players — that would be of little use — instead, the board gives a jolt to players that make a bad move.
A transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) unit is at the heart of this device. Normally used to stimulate nerves for therapeutic purposes, this TENS unit was repurposed to punish poor chess players. It is wired into a set of four relay control boards, which in turn are each attached to a set of 16 relays. That makes 64 relays in total, which also happens to be the number of squares on a chess board. The other side of the TENS unit is wired to the player's wrist to complete the circuit.
Each square on the board is made of a conductive metal, and the chess pieces are also conductive such that the electric shock can be transmitted through them. The board’s squares also sit on top of keyboard switches such that the lifting and movement of each chess piece can be tracked. Each movement is fed into an open source chess engine called Stockfish running on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.
When the system determines that a player has made a blunder, they are given a substantial jolt from the TENS unit ostensibly to correct the error, but probably actually more for laughs. Taser Chess also enforces the basic rules of the game. For example, when a piece is picked up, the entire board is electrified aside from the few squares where a valid move can be made. And if one touches a piece that is not in a position to be moved, you guessed it — shock time! With Stockfish, the player can also solve some chess puzzles, but they better not make a wrong move, or else!
This was a complex and delicate build, so when Everything Is Hacked transported it on a flight to demonstrate it at Open Sauce, well, you can probably imagine how well that went. But after rebuilding it in a hurry (then rebuilding it again after bringing it back home!), Everything Is Hacked is now a master of building chess boards, if not chess itself. And that is a good thing, because Taser Chess has earned Everything Is Hacked a lot of new friends after playing with chess hustlers at the local park.
