My kid loves chess and lately he has been playing the dice chess variant with his friends. For those unfamiliar, it is when a die roll determines which piece type can be moved (e.g., 1=Pawn, 2=Rook, 3=Knight, etc.). However, this is inconvenient because players have to remember which chess piece corresponds to each number, and the mapping has to be explained to every new player.

I’ve had an idea on the back burner for some time to do an embedded project using CircuitPython and an ESP32 based board. Improving his dice chess setup sounded like a great excuse for this.

So I wrote esp32-dice-chess which is just a simple program to randomly choose a chess piece and shows its image on a screen. The code is meant to be used on a T-Display-S3 but it should be easy to port it to a different board.

The ability to use Python for microcontroller firmware development is very convenient, especially for rapid prototyping and ease of development. I totally recommend it to folks doing hardware tinkering.

Happy hacking!