A robotic arm that plays chess! This project integrates aspects of robotics, computer vision, and of course chess. And don’t worry! It's very easy to set up, the code is written in Python and every step of the project is explained in this tutorial series, so it's perfect for those who don't have much experience in the field.
I had lots of fun with it, although I could never beat it
Can you share some pointers for doing this with an AL5D arm as a beginner?
For sure! Are you planning on starting from scratch or do you want to base on this project and modify the code to match the AL5D?
Either way, I suggest that you start with the kinematics, you can use the code of this project as a guide but you will have to modify it according to the dimensions of your arm, this can help you with that:
Also, if you want to build on this project it would be ideal to also use a Raspberry Pi as the brain of the robot or a computer in which you can program in python and you can easily integrate a camera, this way you can reuse a lot of the code.
The only thing you would have to modify in its totality would be how to control the servos (step 4 on the control module). The LSS arm uses smart servos that communicate using the LSS serial protocol which is what is used in the project and it doesn’t work for other arms that use different servos. This also means that you will not be able to use features of the smart servos, such as sensing the current or using the LEDs.
I hope this information is helpful to you but if you have more questions feel free to ask!