Nuts and Volts - February 2017

■ FIGURE 5. Testing the chessboard.

 }
 }
 }
  }
  pathtoKingCount = 0;
  // if we get here, checkmate
  lcd.setCursor(0, 4);
  lcd.print(““““CHECKMATE! “);
  return true;
}

■ FIGURE 6. The LED chessboard on a wood table made by my son.

Future Enhancements

Throughout the Teensy 3.1 chess program, there are many lines that print to the serial monitor of the Arduino GUI with the USB cord in place. These could be eliminated from the program or commented out, but have been left in place as they were helpful when debugging, and will be informative to a user in understanding how the program is operating. A number of functions were also written that simply print information to the serial monitor for debugging, such as printPaths(), printPiecesLoc(), printPiecesVal(), and myDebug(). If you want to modify this program, you should find these functions useful.

A possible enhancement to the existing code might be suggesting moves to each player. Changing the program to have the computer play against a person would require a major effort. The computer used for this could be the Teensy 3.1, or a PC could be interfaced to the chessboard. Surprisingly, the Teensy 3.1 only uses 12% of its program space and 10% of its dynamic memory for the software presented here, so there is lots of room for additional code.

This project has given me a lot of satisfaction, and is one of those where adding possible additions to the code will be a challenging and interesting activity.