CoreXY Chessboard: Electronics Meet Classic Chess
DigiKey takes advantage of the flexibility of the XRP Controller Board and turns it into an automatic magnetic chess board!
Our friends over at DigiKey have done it again! This time, they've made a fully magnetic chess board by combining a clever gantry system, embedded electronics, and an efficient chess engine with some custom programming.
Image from Digikey
This blog will give you a brief overview of how the DigiKey team pulled the whole thing off - if you prefer a more in-depth rundown, we recommend going to their full write-up by clicking on the button below.
CoreXY Gantry System Rundown
The piece-moving mechanism is based on CoreXY kinematics, a clever belt routing system that lets two motors control motion in both X and Y axes with high speed and precision, without adding unnecessary weight to the moving parts since the motors don't travel with the gantry. For full details on how they set up the gantry, check out their full write up! Oh, and the electronics-themed chess pieces are just... chef's kiss.
Image courtesy of DigiKey
Embedded Electronics Used
The DigiKey team utilized a whole host of SparkFun products on this project, but the one we specifically want to highlights is the Experiential Robotics Platform Controller Board. Although this board was designed for the XRP, it remains a great flexible choice for robotics projects with features like a Raspberry Pi® RP2350B dual-core processor, 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM, low-power accelerometer + gyroscope 6-DoF IMU (LSM6DSOX from STMicroelectronics®), two Qwiic® connectors for easy integration of sensors and accessories, two dual-channel motor drivers for four motors total, four servo headers and more!
$52.95
Nice lil' pic of the LCD - taken from DigiKey
Other notable products that helped bring this project together include:
Programming the Project
On top of the hardware, the project includes code integrating CoreXY motion kinematics with the computationally-light chess engine Micro-Max, made by Harm Mulle, suitable to run on embedded processors. That means the board can not only move pieces but actually play games programmatically — even simulating randomness so each game feels fresh. Code for the project can be found on GitHub - open source ftw!
All credit for this project goes to the amazing team over at DigiKey!
