Back at it, working with Raspberry Pi and LCDs

Sorry it's taken so long to get back to this, however as you can expect building electronic chess boards is not my full time occupation! :)

I can tell you however that I've carved out a little time over the last few weeks and have a couple of additional builds in process, there's no new hex files to share yet, but let me tell you what's in the works.

Sishnovag

After working closely with Bryan @ USB Chessboards I started reviewing the Novag Citrine protocol, especially how it interacts with the Arena Windows Chess application. As such I now have a "sishnovag" build that speaks serial commands to Arena and receives move responses. The goal here is to next wire up an LCD to the Sish and get it to output the moves provided by Arena on that LCD. If this works we'd never have to look at the computer screen! So far I've got the hex file sending moves to Arena just fine, however I'll have to wait until later in the week when I get my LCDs from Sparkfun.com.

Sishfish

I've got a Raspberry Pi! Yes I was one of those crazies that ordered the extremely cheap development board earlier this year and now have it sitting on my desk. I was able to put together a new sish build that speaks raw HID to the Raspberry Pi. This build which I'm calling "sishfish" is being designed to talk to Stockfish on the Pi. Again it's my hope that I can readily wire an LCD to the Raspberry Pi and get move output from Stockfish straight to the LCD. In a perfect world I'd get a mini-webserver up on the Raspberry Pi that would show the game in realtime, but that's a project for another day.

Just wanted to share that with you all, also if you have built a sish board please tell me, I'd like to get a gallery going here for Sish boards and their makers. :)

Thanks all!

-hz