rgbqcd/chess-coach

Chess Coach is a novelty project that turns over the board chess into a fully hands free, screen free experience using two bluetooth intimate wellness devices as its input and output. You feed your opponent's moves into the system by squeezing a bluetooth kegel trainer that has a built in pressure sensor, and the system reads your squeezes as short and long presses to figure out which move you are describing. Behind the scenes, the chess engine Stockfish works out what it thinks is the best reply, and the recommended move is buzzed back to you through a bluetooth vibrating device, using a pattern of short and long pulses similar to morse code, so no screen or camera is ever needed once you have learned the encoding. The project talks to these two devices through buttplug.io, an open source protocol and background app for controlling this kind of bluetooth hardware from other software, alongside a separate direct Bluetooth connection to read the pressure sensor, since that particular data stream is not yet supported through buttplug itself. All of this is packaged as a module for Viam, an open source robotics platform, so the kegel trainer, the vibrating device, and the chess logic each show up as their own component within a standard robot configuration, the same way a normal sensor or motor would. Moves are encoded as four short groups of counted squeezes or buzzes, representing the starting square and the destination square of a piece, so every move maps to an unambiguous sequence of numbers. Because counting eighteen or more squeezes per move can get tedious, there is also a shortcut mode where the system buzzes out its own ranked guesses for what move you are trying to enter, and you confirm, reject, or nudge each guess with a quick response instead of spelling the whole thing out. For setup, practice, and debugging while you learn the system, the project also runs a small local web dashboard that shows the status of each connected device and lets you rehearse the squeeze and buzz patterns before playing blind for real. The project is written in Python, relies on Stockfish and the python-chess library for the actual chess logic, and is released under the MIT license.