The Great Gambit — Software

Overview

This project aims to create an autonomous robot capable of playing an intelligent, over-the-board game of chess against a human opponent. The system uses a three-axis, cantilevered, overhead gantry to move parallel to the chess board. Each axis is driven by a stepper motor, the horizontal axes using belts and the vertical axis using a rack and pinion. A crosspoint array of reed switches embedded in the physical chess board allows for piece detection, and with software record of the board state, piece recognition. This system is orchestrated by an MSP432E401Y microcontroller, with chess moves being pulled from the open-source Stockfish chess engine, running on a Raspberry Pi 3A+. All communication between the Raspberry Pi and MSP432 is done through a universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART) serial connection.

This repository contains all embedded code for the system, written in C.

Setup

1. Create a new workspace in Code Composter Studio (CCS)
2. Go to New->CCS Project
3. Select MSP432E4 Family for the target, and then select MSP432E401Y from the dropdown
4. Name the project something descriptive
5. Select Empty Project, not Empty project (with main.c) and click Finish
6. Once the project is created, find its location in your file system and clone this repo into that directory
7. Move all of the files in the Capstone-Software directory into your CCS project directory
8. Delete the Capstone-Software directory. The .git folder should be in your CCS project directory
9. Go back to CCS and build the project. It should build successfully
10. Once the project is building correctly, click the top level directory of the project, then go to File->Properties->Arm Linker->Basic Options
11. Set the Heap size and the Stack size to 4096 and click Apply and Close
12. Rebuild the project

If you project builds successfully, you should be all set!