Man builds electrified chessboard that shocks players for bad moves
Chess is imposing to the uninitiated. Most casual fans could spend their entire lives studying chess theory in a library, only to be systematically humiliated by competitive players. Just getting started is also difficult. The basic rules require a decent amount of memorization time before anyone can make their first moves, an obstacle that has stopped many people from trying the game.
But what if there was a way to quickly improve your skills without spending hours hunched over the board? If the mental strain of learning chess isn’t enough, will actual physical pain do the trick? That’s what YouTuber Fletcher Heisler, aka Everything Is Hacked, asked himself before embarking on a torturous month-long journey of designing, building, and playing a custom chess set capable of delivering a Taser-like shock every time it detects a mistake. As Hackaday recently pointed out, the results are as fascinating as they are sometimes difficult to observe.
I took Taser Chess to open the sauce
Heisler’s Skinner box-shaped chess set was inspired by similarly masochistic DIY projects, like an electrified keyboard, and gets its tension from a reconfigured TENS unit. Short for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation, a TENS machine typically relies on adhesive skin pads that channel low-voltage current to zap muscles and deep tissues. The treatment aims to modify or even block patients’ perception of pain and is often used to relieve conditions associated with osteoarthritis, tendinitis and fibromyalgia.
At most, a TENS unit is somewhat uncomfortable or annoying. Increase the tension and the encounters become a lot more memorable. This is exactly what Heisler did.
Building a functional, reliable, and low-lethal electrified chessboard turned out to be surprisingly more complex than its creator had anticipated. Setting up the underlying chess brain was probably the simplest part. It was simply a matter of running the open source Stockfish chess engine on a Raspberry Pi minicomputer. Unfortunately, things went downhill quickly from there.
It took months of trial and error to create a working prototype. The literal and figurative problems included ensuring every room conducted electricity properly, equipping each square with mechanical keypad switches for easy connections, and countless unintentional shakes. The math didn’t work in Heisler’s favor either. Since each chess square required wiring, each step had to be repeated at least 64 times, or 128 times for two-part steps, 256 times for three-part steps, and so on.
The chessboard ultimately offers four different modes. Illegal mode shocks a player if they make a move that violates the game’s movement rules. Playing against the onboard Stockfish engine offers a zap for any move it considers a mistake â standard chess parlance for a particularly terrible decision. Timed mode fires volts if you take too long, and there’s even a Puzzle mode with over a million preloaded problems to solve. As might be expected at this point, failed puzzles have painful predictive consequences. But since the board can’t move the opponent’s side pieces, users will only get a shock if they don’t line up those moves to match a side display.
However, the toughest injuries to bear aren’t Heisler’s fault. As he transported the invention to its public debut at an annual STEM convention, he opened his suitcase to a broken chessboard not once, but twice. Fortunately, he was able to rebuild the machine and finally show off his merciless contraption. But if the âTaser Chessâ project is wacky and fascinating, it unfortunately did not contribute to making its creator the next Bobby Fischer.
“I had already been building for months, and in fact my chess game was getting more and more worse because I spent all my time playing with cables,â Heisler says at one point.
He even lost every game against chess scammers playing in the park near his house. That said, it appears to have made progress on at least one major component of an electrified chessboard.
âI shocked myself so much while building the board that I almost didn’t notice it anymore,â Heisler admitted.
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