Chesspal

Chesspal is a responsive webserver for USB DGT e-Boards. Its core features are to record chess games and play against configurable AIs.

Special thanks to:

• @notnil (https://github.com/notnil/chess) for an amazing golang based chess package that is used as a basis
• @jromang (https://github.com/jromang/picochess) for the inspiration

Features

• runs on any hardware, including Raspberry pi
• record games played on USB DGT e-Board
• play against configurable AI
• manage played games (pgn)
• import played games on Lichess for analysis
• optional hints for best move
• undo moves
• optional evaluation of last move including "eval bar"
• use DGT e-board "upside down" (flip ranks and files)
• clients simply connect via http. You can view and manage your games on any device including smartphone

Sever flags

Flag	Default	Description
--config	./configs/chesspal.yaml	Location of chesspals config file

Config file

The config file comes predefined with values suitable for a raspberry setup. You can add UCI chess engines together with UCI values to modify AIs or eval engines.

Rclone

In order to backup all played games automatically, chesspal can run rclone syncs at startup and game end. To enable this feature the config settings rclone.games must be set tu true. You can use rclone to sync the games folder with any supported remote, like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Development

Start server:

make run

Start and watch frontend:

make frontend

Create release bundle:

make release

Raspberry pi setup

The makefile ships with targets to easily setup a fresh Raspian installation. However, the arm binaries can be used for manual installation as well.

To setup a fresh Raspberry pi using makefile targets, add a .env based on .env.example. Further, create a config file configs/chesspal.raspi.yaml. A working golang and npm setup is required. Then you can run the following commands:

make release # to generate a new release bundle locally
make raspi-install-stockfish # if you would like to use stockfish
make raspi-install-fairy-stockfish # if you would like to use fairy-stockfish
make raspi-install-chesspal
make raspi-install-rclone # if you would like to use rclone

To debug the installation you can have a look into the logs

make raspi-logs-all