Chessnut Air Review

• modded pieces or default? (my OEM pieces are just fine)
• live in the US?

my running theory is the sensors in the sensor kits they sent to the US for the white bishops are flawed. None of mine work on that square but I can stack felt on my OEM pieces and it registers fine on all the squares.

Here is a peek at my set (I swap out the white bishops when playing). At some point I'm going to cannibalize my OEM sensors if the replacements perform as badly as my sensor sets.

Your modded chess set looks very big for the sq,s tychay Going on your video , I would move the sensor closer to the board ie Bishop wise , I had this in the past with my modded knight & some pawns . Or uses thinner felts , Then bingo !

• Modded pieces. 
• Live in US. 

I got two sets of sensors for making pieces. Neither of my two extra sets of sensors has an issue with the W Bishop.

Tychay in your video you have a lot of electronics in close proximity to the Air+ board. I'm curious if you move the board to a different location, away from other electronics, do the white bishops still have a problem?

Also there's an Android app on the Google Play store called EMF Detector by ElectroSmart, you might want to play with this app to get an idea of the intensity of the various radio frequency devices in the area you setup your board.

Nice, thanks for this tip.

I have experienced the exact same issue as tychay on sevaral, but not all, of the extra sensors I have purchased - all of the malfunctioning ones have been white bishops, most notably on square A5 on two different boards. I have tested this in multiple locations, including outdoors held in my hands (i.e., not on a metal table...).

In the test you can see I removed the felts and even used a sensor set out of the box. I can get them to register intermittently on that square sometimes if there is no felt and I push down. Another factor may be the Chessnut Air+ vs the Air boards.

As for interference, I have the same problem in my living room where the only electronics within 5 feet would be the phone I be used for testing. The issue is that I'm recording the video with the phone I'd connect on and want to show it operating. Besides, if it were that finnicky then it's a lemon because the whole reason I got this is to have a smaller board I can play OTB next to my desk. Luckily, I've played many games with the bishops swapped out with OEM ones (I even have the felts from my mods stuck under them for testing purposes), so I know it's a sensor QC thing and not a board problem. Not sure why I need to go through hoops here when we have a working null hypotheses: the OEM pieces work fine and should ostensibly have the exact same sensors.

I don't have an android tablet or phone. The only android platform I own is likely the thing that emulates CarPlay in my Honda Civic 10g.

A new sensor set (or two?) should arrive today. I can test them right out of the box after I ID them. Trust me, it's a bad batch as you can see the OEM ones are detected fine even if I put pads under them. Oddly the two sensor boxes I had were packaged differently (in one the black and white sensors were in separate bags, in the other they were all bagged together).

…

I am aware the pieces are big for the square size. 35mm squares are very smaller than most library pieces which are 40 or 45mm) so that's the that. I don't mind because my converted pieces weigh as much as my library Zagreb set unmodded! Besides, this obsession on square size to piece size was not a thing when I played in the 1990's. Many smaller sets had weird ratios back then and were quite cramped and none of us minded. My thinking is online popularity spurred blitz play which demands better designed pieces.

BTW, they're actually slightly smaller in diameter than say the 2.6" Collectors Staunton from ChessBazaar which people have modded for the Chessnut Air, so while cramped, it's very playable (other than hurting visibility of the LEDs). If it was a thing I could shave off the edges, but I like the pieces the way they are.

If I want something closer to regular, I have a set of Zagreb 3.1" from ChessBazaar https://www.chessbazaar.com/traditional-russian-zagreb-chess-pieces-in-ebonized-boxwood-natural-boxwood-3-1-king.html Those will fit the squares more comfortably than most sets (though again, those are clearly designed for 40mm squares). But I'm happy with this set and am not sure I want to mod a second set even though I own two extra sensor sets.

Dubrovnik v2.0 - as I mentioned last time I posted a picture, I really liked the set I had created, but wasn’t completely in love with the stark white of the white pieces. My local library only has white filament for their 3d printer, but one a bit further away had beige. So here is version 2.0, with new and improved white pieces that are less white. Just played a game with them - the balance on them is really nice. A really good set to play with. 

Once again, this is using @Conor_OKane ‘s brilliant Dubrovnik 3d print files at 70% scale.

@mvk20

Very impressive

A quick message!

I've received a Chessnut GO review unit and contrary to my expectation, the GO pieces are compatible with the existing Air/Air+/EVO/PRO boards!

update, they sent one new sensor set. Both white bishops worked but one was flakey (with 1mm felt I'd need to push down on a5 to get it to register consistently). I'll use the one that works well and swap out the spotty one into the OEM to get two working sets, then reach out to them about the fact that I bought two sensor kits, not one.

bonjour, J ai un problème de détection de pièces, mon roi noir est afficher en cavalier blanc , comment résoudre le problème ? Merci 

I would contact Chessnut support - contact(at)chessnutech.com

Je contacterais le support Chessnut - contact(at)chessnutech.com

I'm really happy with my Chessnut Air. 🤗 I bought it on prime day with a discount and it was delivered 5 days later in perfect condition.

I almost despaired, because I use my Google account to log into chess.com and Google wouldn't let me log into chess.com via the Chessnut app. Thank goodness, I found the solution right in this thread, just had to assign a new password to my chess.com account on the website.

Ever since then everything has been running smoothly. No problems connecting to chess.com, no disconnects during games (against bots). Piece recognition has worked perfectly so far and is very fast and it feels almost natural to move the pieces of my opponent as well. I like the smaller size of the board, and while the pieces are plastic, they are nice enough and the dark ones even have some kind of wood-ish grain.

I prefer playing against different chess.com bots to playing against actual people and the Chessnut air lets me do this without any hassle, while at the same time being able to push real pieces over the board and practice my three dimensional thinking and spacial awareness. I'm really delighted, how enjoyable I find playing with the Chessnut Air. It's all very intuitive.

A couple of month ago, I bought a Millenium King Competition, because I thought a stand-alone chess computer would be better than relying on some wobbly Bluetooth connection to my smartphone, and I really, really wanted to like "The King" (even named him Charles 🤪), but I just don't enjoy playing on it. While even on my very low level it feels like it is playing some decent game without dropping random pieces, which is good, everything else is so cumbersome. Scrolling through some old-fashioned menu on a tiny display from the 1990s with different buttons and arrows is a pain, and I had to download a manual to figure out different options. I didn't even mind the pressure sensor technique that much, but now that I have played with piece recognition, I don't think, I can ever go back.

And while I know, I can program all sorts of personalities and adjust playing styles on the Millenium, I just don't want to be bothered with it. I just want to challenge different bots that someone else has programmed for me, try out once in a while how many moves I can survive against Mittens and maybe lose against my one and only OTB chess buddy and run a review later to figure out, where I took the wrong turn again.

I only started playing chess one and a half years ago, and I am just not really good at it, and as I'm also kind of old, most likely will never be good enough, to use the Millenium up to it's full potential. 

So, I am really, really happy with the Chessnut Air. I have tried out both the Chessnut app and the new Chessnut app, which is pre release, I gather, and both have been running smoothly. I have not downloaded any of the other suggested apps.

I just finished adding sensors to some wood pieces for my Air. I researched a number of different piece sets until I found one that looked good and had the right size. They are by a company called Asney and are available on Amazon for cheap (<15 USD). The pieces are a little bigger than the stock Air pieces but not too big for the board by any means. I used a drill and a Dremel to make the holes for the sensors, along with some 3D printed jigs to help hold them in place while drilling. Then I used tungsten putty to stick the sensors in the holes, which also gives the pieces some nice weight (I used just about 4 oz for the whole set including spare queens). I finished them off with 1mm red felt. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The pieces look nicer and play nicer than the stock ones.

Very nice job 👏 👏👏

@montagdude

That's a stunning vision. Very nice set, well done

Thanks everyone! It was pretty tedious drilling all those holes, but I think it was worth it.