Reusing an auto-sensory commercial chessboard

There are commercial electronic chessboards, such as those from Mephisto, which can be used for this project. The benefits are obvious: less work and lower economic cost, obtaining also a "magnetic" sensory board to connect via USB to the PC.

Here I will explain how to adapt a Mephisto Modular, but the same applies for an Exclusive.

Printed circuit board. You can see how the reed switches are not in the center of the squares, but in the corner, as we mentioned here: Sensors

Here is the pinout. Columns and rows should be connected to the microcontroller, as shown in Assembling section.

As this project consists in emulate an USB keyboard to send commands to the PC, the LEDs are not used, and therefore there's no need to modify the PCB in any way. Just don't connect anything to LED pins.

For reference the complete schematic is supplied: Sensory board of a Mephisto Modular

PROTOTYPE

Currently I'm using a prototype based on this chessboard to debug SolusChess program...

I've assembled a complete one as a "Travel" SolusChess, too:

Ready to play!