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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

Cute and I'm glad someone is doing that, but it's too small and out of proportion for tournaments etc. You want squares of about 2.25 inches and king height of 3.75 inches, about. If you're going to all the trouble of magnetic sensors and whatnot, you might as well make the board and pieces meet the relevant standards.

These days, image recognition is good enough that it's probably feasible to just video the chess game on a non-sensory board, and let software figure out what moves were played. In cases of doubt or dispute (blitz scrambles), humans can examine the video.

If anyone cares, the tournament sensory sets that most organizers use are made by DGT and cost around $600 iirc. The magnetic sensor system is very clever and was patented in the 1990s or so, but the patents would be expired by now.

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The DGT Pegasus [1], which is designed for online play as the device presented her, costs 189 Euro. I know one of the founders of DGT and once applied there for a job for the app development, but did not feel that there was a match at the moment also because I am not really into chess.

[1] https://dgtshop.com/products/chess-boards/dgt-pegasus

That is nice! It's 35cm which is fine for casual games, though online tends to be speed chess and bigger pieces help there. Smaller pieces are fiddlier and easier to fumble if you move too quickly. It would be nice if the Pegasus at least had LEDs at each square to tell you the opponent's move, instead of presumably making you read notation from the screen to transfer the move. But it's a start, and it's fairly affordable.

I do think almost all online competitive players don't use anything like that. They play on screen using a full sized screen and a mouse.

If you scroll down the page, you will see that it has white light around the piece, which are LEDs, I presume.

Trivial to scale, since it's open source.

The C++ code is a bit naive, but easily extendable to use a proper engine. https://github.com/Concept-Bytes/Open-Chess/blob/main/Chess....

For a DIY project the problem with scaling up is that ordering 50x50cm PCB is going to be quite pricy. Taking into account minimum order quantity of 5, that's ~$300-$600 according to https://pcbshopper.com/ . And that's blank PCB no components or PCBA. If you can find 10-20 people locally to share a bigger batch (good luck with that) you can get it down to more reasonable $25-$40 per board.

To keep this cost effective at DIY level, it needs to be redesigned in a more modular way for larger sizes instead of having one giant PCB. For DIY project might even handwire it using through hole magnet sensors and addressable LED strip.

Surprisingly quote for 5x64 ~= 350 2x2cm boards was as low $30-$90. I knew it would be cheaper but didn't expect that much. That's assuming I didn't break the quote calculator by hitting a weird edge case. Happy middle ground would probably be 2x40cm strips one per row or something similar.

Also the PCB isn't open source. You only get gerber files not the original project files for schematics or board layout which would be needed to modify it.

I would go without this PCB. Normal wooden pieces with a magnet, and a normal board with a LED would look better, and would be cheaper. Plus a touch or e-paper display (who starts: white or black, ...)

Looked around and found this perfect set. Smart Electronic Chessboard https://a.aliexpress.com/_Ex1ynXa

I also found a dutch e-paper board but the Chinese looked much better.

PCBs get more expensive with larger area, but it should probably be ok.

I hunted down the Gerbers and uploaded to JLCPCB real quick, the cost for the bare PCB at the current size (218x218 mm) is $22 for 5 pieces, excluding shipping. I thought it was interesting to have as a reference.

Scaling up the PCB is not possible in their web UI since the Gerbers "lock in" the size, of course.

But barely get more expensive if you get 64.

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