full-stack-chessboard

Description

A chessboard with built in piece detection and Stockfish engine. From turning the pieces on a lathe, to soldering the components, to coding the Raspberry Pi. This is true full stack development.

This Project Includes:

A Wood Working component with turning the pieces and building the board

An Electrical Engineering component of wiring and soldering it together

A Software component with coding the logic of the board on a Raspberry Pi Zero

While I had more experience in some (Software) than others (Wood Working), each took a tremendous amount of time to accomplish the parts necessary for this project.

Now that's full stack

Circuitry

First created and tested on breadboards, final soldering was done in this layout (created using KiCAD):

With the boards (pre-soldering):

In the general layout (pre-soldering, pre-wires):

And the layout of the reed switches was (pre-soldering):

Piece and Board creation

Thank you to Paul (Grandpa) for buiding the board for me:

And for building the pieces with me (first time on a lathe!):

Pieces contain magnets for reed switches (top) and RFID chips for scanning (bottom):

Python Modules

Take a look at the code for full details, but here is a brief overview of the modules I used/created for the project.

import string, time, os, datetime, sys, re
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

I contributed to make this work in my project: Github

from stockfish import Stockfish

I built this to run the 74HC595 Github PyPI

import pi74HC595

Editied from: Github to run the LCD1602 display With accompanying Video

import lcddriver

Used to run the MFRC522 RFID reader: Github

from mfrc522 import SimpleMFRC522

Used to run the MCP23017s: Github

import board, busio
from adafruit_mcp230xx.mcp23017 import MCP23017

Engine

The engine ended up being a fair bit of effort to get working since the Python module Stockfish needed some changes to make it work how I wanted.

And the engine itself here: Stockfish Download

Compiled by running "sudo make -j4 profile-build ARCH=armv7 LDFLAGS="-latomic -lpthread -lgcov" on the source code

Components

• Mastercraft 25W Soldering Iron
• Raspberry Pi Zero W
  • 16 GB MicroSD Card
  • 2.5A Power Supply
• 2x20-pin Male Header
• Freenove RFID Starter Kit
  • 74HC595
  • LED Bar
  • LCD1602 Display
  • RC522 RFID module
  • 1N4001 Diode
  • 28 Male-to-Female Wires
• 32 x 20mm 13.56MHZ RFID Tags
• 3 x Switches
• 2 x Buttons
• 4 x MCP23017
• 32 x Neodymium Magnets
• Various PCB Prototype Boards
• 10 x 220 ohms Resistors
• 4 x 1K ohms Resistors
• 68 x 10K ohms Resistors
• 22 Gauge Multicolour Wires
• 64 x Reed Switches

Credits

• Sam Gunter

License

MIT License. Please see License File for more information.