Digital Chess Board based on Array of Hall-Effect Sensors

This paper addresses a novel concept of digital chess board realized with an array of Hall- Effect sensors. Main task of digital chess board is autonomous detection of player's moves. Therefore, players do not have to write down their own moves on a sheet of paper. Non- invasive piece moves detection is considered, with minimum required installations in a game room. The digital chees board pre-sented in this paper has a Hall-Effect sensor placed under the middle of each field on the chess board, while each chess piece has a permanent magnet placed on its bottom. Sen-sors, total of 64, are organized as 8x8 array. Microcontroller reads sensor data and sends them to a remote PC for stor-age in a database and board visualization. Rows are multi-plexed in time, i.e. one row is active in a certain time in- stance. States in the column of the currently active row are stored in a corresponding matrix column. Con to this ap-proach is in its ability to detect piece presence on the field, without the information about the piece type. The proposed approach is low cost, non-invasive and requires only power and communication cable.