Chessnut Air Review

Thanks for the pictures! The zagreb ones look very nice, I'm sure you'll be very happy to use those.

I agree with you that the collector series does not look completely right to me, on this board. Very cramped...

Questionable about both

a) removal, and:

b) interference on the sensors

@Rsava And to top it off, super expensive. I’m hoping I get good results with the Bluetac.

Nah, that's about the right price.

Used to buy this every year for Pinewood Derby cars with my boys. We would put the balance point right in front of the rear wheels using almost all tungsten. The putty was cheap compared to the little tungsten cubes ... I bet I spent closet to $500 bucks just in cubes over the 10 years we did it.

Yeah, I spent a bit teaching my boys how to build PW cars. In fact, a whole set of bench power tools, scroll saws, band saws, drills, and sanders .... But we always had some of the coolest cars and we were always fast. Plus my sons can build just about anything from scratch now.

And now @zephyrusid has given me the idea to use the Collector series pieces on a DGT Pegasus board. I know this is a Chessnut topic but here are some pics of the pieces on my Pegasus:

They seem to fit well

@rsava

That does look better than on the chessnut air board. I always thought the squares were equally sized?

Are you able to get chips for the pegasus?

Very good fit on the Pegasus board! And I agree, much too cramped on the Air.

I don't own the Pegasus, but my understanding is that the Pegasus board has larger squares.

The DGT Pegasus (and the Centaur before it, which I own) doesn't have individual piece detection, but just simple induction sensors and uses the move history to know which piece is on which square. So, for instance, you could put a coin on a square and it will detect it as a "piece".

The advantage is that it becomes extremely easy to make custom pieces. Small adhesive aluminium foil discs on the bottom of the pieces are the simplest solution. https://www.amazon.com.au/Shiny-Silver-Aluminum-Diameter-Circles/dp/B007Y7DKWC

This stuff: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b10056887/ also works! This allows for a very very thin conductive layer that you can then put a thin felt over.

I made some custom pieces for my Centaur some years back.

The Pegasus does not need chips, all it needs is a metallic disk on the bottom, so I may play around with different things.

Here is a set I modified to use on that board, I purchased 2 of these sets, one for the Pegasus and one for a roll up vinyl board. The bottom is just metallic tape from Amazon and I cut the discs to the base size. It works well. I bet i can get the Collector pieces to work, put some tungsten in them and cover with metal discs and felt.

@zephyrusid DGT website says square size for Pegasus is 40 mm, king height 70 mm. Centaur is 48 mm square size, king height 86 mm.

Chessnut website lists Air and Air+ square size as 35 mm. Air king height 68 mm. Chessnut Air+ and Evo both king height 67 mm, base 26 mm.

@mvk20 - Here are the piece measurements for all the sets:

Is that table made of steel in your picture?

I thought I read that it was not a good idea to place metallic objects near the Chessnut board because it could interfere with the electro-magnetic resonance sensors that are inside the board.

@Rsava Thank you !!! I’m sure this info will be helpful for me and others as we work on custom sets!

The downside of the chessnut air is that I find the SQs to small , which means it's really hard to find a set that fits the SQs without being over sized or a tight fit , if you do the pawns are to small for the chips , Would be nice if chessnut air made a slightly bigger board say 40mm SQ

Still for the rest it's great !

Yep. My view is that plastic pieces probably work better for the Air...

The Zagreb set truly is not a bad set on the Air (or Evo). It is not the "perfect" size, but it is more than playable.

Stay tuned - I am working on a 3d print set that has “perfect”-ish proportions according to some posts on here (very similar to stock pieces), and the sensors are going to fit. No trimming at all for the pieces, looks like I might need to clip a mm or 2 off the pawn sensors. 

It’s pretty cool when you can scale stuff to any exact size you want. And I’m getting the whole set printed for around $12 I think at the public library.

I'd be very interested in what you come up with. What I'd like more than anything is more weight even in the current pieces, but I'm being that would hamper the piece detection.

Weight is going to be a challenge for sure. I know tungsten is one idea out there. I’m going to try with just the Bluetac first - I think they might be well balanced even if pretty light. We’ll see. I’m going to try to get the first set done, and then assess where I think improvements might be made.

My Collectors Series set from chessbazzer came in , took out the weights today no easy task , pawn wise , will drill holes for the chips tomorrow & have some tungsten on it's way .

For the rest look 's nice ,