I’m not the biggest fan of chess apps, but let’s face it: they are the only alternative to play in the distance with friends and basically anyone in the world. For our board, I want the connectivity of the apps plus the nice feel of playing with real pieces.

Tavo has been working on an open software to connect the board to Lichess server. We also wanted to include chess.com server but it’s closed. I’ll try to contact them hoping to add their app to the board. Who knows It might be worth the shot! ;)

To connect our board to Lichess we started using an ESP32 but we have problems with the TLS and the HTTPS library.

After knocking our heads against the wall around this issue Tavo found this amazing development in Aruduino’s project hub:

 - https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/kzra/lichess-link-cbdbab

It uses an Arduino One Wifi so we moved to a compatible module to use his open-source project as a base, the Arduino Nano 33 IoT. This will kill two birds with one stone by also helping us on having an open platform

We already played our first games through Lichess server! But, there’s still a pain in the butt, the process to connect to any Wifi network, fortunately, Tavo is as hooked as I am and found a great tool to make the process easier.

So now we are working on implementing a captive portal feature to make everything work seamless. This is all the progress at the moment, I’ll let you know our final implementation very soon!

Feel free to join our discord server and get to chat about this project and chess in general: https://discord.gg/3aCpVynH