Raspberry Turk
The Raspberry Turk is a robot that can play chess—it's entirely open source, based on Raspberry Pi, and inspired by the 18th century chess playing machine, the Mechanical Turk.
The Raspberry Turk is built into a small 3 ft by 3 ft table. It has a box which is fastened to one side and houses all of the electronics. The arm is attached to the top of the box. There is a tall vertical pipe fastened to the box that supports a fixture with the camera and lighting directly above the board. The pipe is black steel plumbing pipe from Home Depot.
The camera is attached by an HDMI cable running through the pipe. I took the model for Raspberry Pi camera case found here, and adapted it so that the backplate could be fastened to the bottom of the wooden fixture. The model for the adapted backplate can be found here.
The fixture also hold three 3 Phillips 5000K PAR38 flood lights used to light the chessboard evenly with bright white light. Using high temperature lighting ensured colors remained accurate which is important for the computer vision algorithms.
The chessboard is painted onto the table using FrogTape and matte black & white spray paint.
