Tinkerer makes chess robot with Raspberry Pi

Joey Meyer has used his Raspberry Pi for a special project: he has used the board as the basis for a chess robot. This Raspberry Turk can recognize chess pieces and place them independently in another place.

Meyer shows the robot on his website, and also provides the instructions for putting together such a chess robot himself. The hardware requires, among other things, a Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Camera, while the software is written in Python. The system can independently distinguish the different chess pieces from each other, and how this works is explained on one of the web pages.

As befits a real robot, the Raspberry Turk can make independent decisions. The software is powered by Stockfish, which Meyer describes as the best open source chess engine in the world. Incidentally, Meyer states that he wants to develop his own chess engine in the long run.

How good you have to be at chess to beat the Raspberry Turk is not clear. According to Meyer, his machine is based on the Mechanical Turk, an 18th century ‘chess robot’, which turned out to be fake; in the Turk turned out to be a human chess player who operated the machine.