Motorized Chessboard

Roy Huallpa, Vincent Lee, Yuqing Wang

Inspiration:

Online chess may satisfy your craving for chess, but how can we enable remote chess while maintaining the physical form factors and emotional reward of slamming down pieces when playing chess in person?

Goal:

Our goal is to allow for remote game of chess, but with a physical chessboard that will automatically move chess pieces to display the state of a game.

Description:

A physical chessboard with a system of reed sensors and motors that can move chess pieces based off of user input.

The motors will be a part of a pulley system that will move an electromagnet to pick up and drop chess piece

Scematic for proposed board piece

Layout for proposed board piece

Scematic for Board Control Layout for Board Control

Printed PCBs of both Layouts Current design of our project

Future Improvements:

Some of the components like the electromagnet can get really hot after running for a while, so having some way to control the heat will greatly improve the functionality

We ordered through-hole reed sensors, while the PCB was designed for surface mount reed sensors. We can make this more consistent for an easier time assembling.

When designing our PCB, we did not consider the size of holes, which led to a more difficult time with soldering