Chessconnect: a free chrome extension for electronic chessboards

This one? https://playchessup.com/en-eu

The one chess.com is promoting is Chessup 2. There was a gushing article in chess.com news a few weeks back that made it sound like Chessup had just now invented online play with a real board:

https://www.chess.com/news/view/chessup-2-now-you-can-play-chess-com-games-directly-on-a-board

Ah I see! And it's not even available...

When I was buying an electronic chess board, the most important thing for me was how big the square was on which the piece stood. I wanted to have a board with a square of 5 cm, but at that moment in Slovenia it was not possible to get anything other than a DGT Pegasus with a square of 4 cm. The piece detection technology itself is excellent, but the battery sucks, otherwise it was a completely solid solution with a power bank, but if the board has a rechargeable battery, then I see no reason why you should use an additional power source. Anyway, because of the battery and too small a square, I bought the Tabutronic 45mm. It sounds like a 5 mm larger square, imperceptibly, but it is not so. The board is excellent, the square suits me perfectly, although I would prefer a square of 5 cm. Tabutronic Sentio, which does not recognize pieces, is in my opinion one of the best boards by far, which I was able to check on forums on the Internet. I have no intention of criticizing others because I simply don't know them, but I will stay with Tabutronic and maybe the only thing I might buy again is the board that is still on kickstarter, which is the GoChess board.

TabuTonic now offers a 55mm Sentio,too, which is the board I am using for my private games.

Are Tabutronic and Certabo the same company? Are they the same boards?

Technically, it is two different companies but basically it is the same. They share one develeopment department. The Certabo board is technically equal to the Cerno from TabuTronic. Those are boards with RFID piece recognition. The Sentio line from TabuTronic works with magnets (like the DGT Pegasus).

That's an interesting answer, thanks. Good to know (if I'm understanding correctly) that Certabo has individual piece recognition, but Tabutronic doesn't and works like my DGT Centaur, tracking pieces from the initial setup.

That's not entirely correct: The TabuTronic "Cerno" line does have individual piece recognition. The "Sentio" only senses, if there is a piece on a field but does not know which one. This has to be deduced from the previous position, which works surprisingly well. Just pawn promotion poses some extra challenges. But I am working on that...

Thanks for the correction. That's very precise and very helpful. It's the Sentio then, it seems, that works like the DGT Centaur.

Chesscom has gone beyond gushing. They are now into 80's Disco Party Time with the ChessUp 2 board.

Yeah... nah.

My view is that chess.com could go deep with the integration with the ChessUp 2, but it doesn't seem like the case. You'd note that the material doesn't mention tournaments at all. To me, this all seems rather low effort and the board will likely only work with chess.com random match up and bots. That's all good, but if the board's built-in firmware is coded to work only through a current implementation of chess.com's APIs, a future event by either chess.com or ChessUp where this board is no longer on the agenda could effectively nerf the integrated functionality.

In short, I'm worried about chess.com's committment to the device in the long term.

Sure, they were committed to DGT eboard implementation, initially.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about hat one.

So THAT would have been the first manufacturer to work with a chess playing site to offer a direct stable connection between board and site.

Hmmmm. Interesting.

Hi, I recently got a Chessnut Air board and am having trouble getting Chessconnect to work. If I set it to use Bluetooth, it pairs on the main page of both lichess and chess.com but then disconnects as soon as I click anything, such as starting a game. If I set it to USB, I get the following error:

NotAllowedError: Failed to open the device. Error: Failed to open the device.

Looking at the web permissions page for the extension, everything seems to be okay. USB and HID devices are set to "Ask." Is this a user permissions issue? I am on Slackware Linux, for reference, but I have an Ubuntu laptop I can try later as well.

Not sure about the Slackware implementation, but:

You have to "Connect" on the game page. If you connect on the main page, then start a game (which changes web pages), it disconnects and you have to reconnect.

Okay, thanks, that's seems to have worked in a game against a bot, except that halfway through it stopped registering my moves, even though it was still connected. I'd still like to get the USB option working.

@Rsava is right about connecting on the game page. However, this is at least partially solved with the new 3.4 release which is currently in beta test.

As for USB and Linux: you have to grant access to the usb device. Typically using some udev rule. This varies between different distros but a short google should provide an answer. If anybody has the correct udev rules at hand I can put them onto the Chessconnect web page.

Okay, thanks. Some googling did turn up udev, but I don't know much about writing udev rules. I'll try to figure it out later if no one has one ready to go.

You can also use chmod on the device. But that is a less permanent solution.