Raspberry Pi 5 powers a physical chessboard that it plays on

Playing digital chess against a bot or player is always a great way to practice and learn some strategies. But there’s something about a physical chessboard that just feels right right you know what? It’s like owning a physical version of a book, a CD for an album, or a game box for your favorite title.

If you want the best of both worlds, someone has come up with a way to display bot moves on a physical chessboard using a Raspberry Pi 5. Most importantly, support for online play is in the works.

This Raspberry Pi 5 Chessboard is style with all the convenience

You don’t have to sacrifice anything

Above Raspberry Pi subreddituser Refeying has shown an automatic chessboard. It uses magnets to move parts and registers your movements. It flips it cleanly to the side as you drop it for easier removal from the board.

This is how the creator describes his project:

The Pi is connected with a Pico SKR V1.0 that controls the CoreXY system with a solenoid. Up to 64 multi-directional hall sensors on 8 custom PCBs via optional pin header and IO-Expander. Some temporary push buttons, a 5-inch LCD display and status LEDs on the sidewalls.

It is currently managed by Stockfish, Maia3, Rodent IV and Patricia.

According to Refining, current games are saved in Portable Game Notation (PGN) format. This means that the board can remember the state of the game when you shut it down. In the future, they hope to get the Lichess and Chess.com APIs working with it; This allows them to play people online, where moves are shown between the virtual board and the real board.

Refeying hasn’t released the source code or schematics, but hopefully they’ll look into it once this project is finished to full feature. It would be great to do something like this at home and play against people online with real figures.