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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

I've been talking for a long time about making one of these - though my idea was to put magnets in the pieces and drag them across the board from underneath. Any advice on getting started with robotics? I'm fairly comfortable moving servos attached to wheels around, but I'm a little more hesitant when it comes to things with fixed range of motion.

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What will you do when a knight needs to jump over a row of pawns?

As for advice, I'd look into implementing an xy table with an electromagnet. You can find many open designs from the 3d printer world. You will probably want hard limit switches at the end of each axis for alignment.

My plan was to space the pieces out so I could move the Knight down the lines between the pieces. Inelegant, but simple.

You may find this useful/interesting/inspiring: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1199521315/sisyphus-the...

I'm fairly sure I saw a machine that did it with magnets many years ago. But it's such a vague memory that I wasn't sure I didn't imagine it.

Found a video of one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BobOCMj1Qhs

I considered moving pieces via magnet underneath the board as well, but decided to go with the arm to remain more true to the original Turk. The robotics was the hardest part of this project for me since my experience is software not hardware, but I found the resources on the ServoCity website to be incredibly useful.

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