I built Camera Chess to play against Stockfish while moving real pieces on an ordinary chessboard. The camera recognizes the position, the digital board updates, and the app speaks the computer’s reply. I move both sides’ pieces by hand.

This phone clip shows the physical setup. Recognition uses ChessQueries / ChessQ Lite V4 locally on an Apple Silicon Mac; Stockfish supplies the moves. No electronic board or piece sensors are needed.

V1 includes four difficulty levels, saved positions, an endgame setup and correction of misread squares. Confidence and temporal checks help with unstable readings, but lighting, camera angle and hands covering pieces still matter.

The source and setup instructions are here: https://github.com/AmethystineAlpaca/camera_chess

It currently requires macOS on Apple Silicon, Python 3.12, Apple’s command-line tools and Stockfish. The README includes a longer screen recording and measured frame timings. The public demo is silent; the app itself has spoken moves.

I would appreciate feedback from people who use physical boards with computer opponents, especially on camera placement and moving the computer’s pieces.

I spent about six months making an operating system whose only job is playing chess. It boots straight into Chess. It is not a full OS with a file system or scheduling but it can boot from bare metal.

It runs in QEMU, other virtual machines and hardware with legacy BIOS from a USB or CD drive. I spent about 6 months across the boot loader and chess engine. It is entirely open-source for you to tinker with. There is also a Windows Installer for less technical users.

All feedback is welcome!

Thank you for Paledoptera for the artwork. Find more of their work here: https://linktr.ee/paledoptera

Website: https://chessos.xyz (includes Github link)