Chessconnect: a free chrome extension for electronic chessboards

DGT is more orientated to "professional" consumers, that is providing support from tournament organizers: they all rely on DGT because their product is great and they were the only providers (and still are, I don't think other companies like Chessnut have the power to compete in the tournament sector yet). On the contrary, they are completey disregarding final consumers, also because we're not enough in number to grant them a consistent economic return.

That is why they put very little effort in supporting final users issues. I don't think it's a wise decision, if I were them I would put more effort in that, expecially now that there are several competitors which in some cases offer even a more functional product. Like che Chessnut Pro, for example, might not be "better" in terms of quality... MAYBE... but there's no doubt that the led on the board makes more practical to use it for online play, even without a clock. If I were DGT I would be VERY worried by their innovations... But I am not

They've done upgrade modules before. When the Smartboard was released it had better piece recognition than the earlier boards, so you can buy the updated circuit board and swap it. Someone on here has done that. So yearh upgrading BT would be easy.
If I owned it, I want to dominate all markets, or at least to attempt to. I'm no expert but the ROI would be worth it, or other manufacturers would bother surely. I'd certainly want to have to best products on the market.

A couple of questions.. I am currently playing with my Chessnut Air+ connected to my work laptop. I couldn't connect it via Bluetooth, it says my Bluetooth LE is not available. It might very well be because my laptop is company controlled and as far as I know location services are disabled (I heard they are needed for Bluetooth LE to work?), is that the reason? I ask because on the other hand I could connect the board with LucasChess...

Anyways, I could phisically connect it via USB and play... which leads me to the second question. If I takeback a move playing against a bot, chess.com accepts the move, but the board is telling me the position is wrong (I see the leds lighted up where I have the wrong pieces on)... How do I set up the position on the air+ so that chessconnect accepts it?

Never mind for the second one, I figured out myself: once the bot accepts the takeback and reset the board on the laptop, I just to the same on the pyshical e-board, ignoring the leds that light up, and then reload the page

Regarding Bluetooth LE you could check, if the setting the chrome flags helps:

chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features
chrome://flags/#enable-web-bluetooth-new-permissions-backend

If not, you are probably out of luck.

Yep, no, I have already tried and set all of the three flags (well, the first turned out to be unapplicable as I am not on Linux), and it didn't work. Too bad. What I don't understand is why BLT connection works if I use Lucaschess instead. I thought it was not working because I have location services disabled, but they are also for Lucaschess... So, is it a limitation of connection made from a browser?

It might be a problem with the Web Bluetooth API. This is still in beta. So yes, it might be a browser thing.

If DGT could be persuaded to add Bluetooth LE to their boards, we would have iPhone support in no time. O:-)

TBH, it should be more "normal" for Apple to support normal BT, shouldn't it?

I'm sure there are a lot of players who'd buy a DGT board if it were better supported. I have the plastic Smartboard. I'd upgrade but it'd be nearly useless if Chessconnct were no longer available. They really are missing a trick. They should have monopolised before all of their competitors got to work.

There must be a way of transmitting a USB input to Bluetooth? Like how Millennium do it. Is there a generic version of that?

I was looking for something like this, but could not find anything. It would not be too hard to build an DGT-to-BLE converter using an Arduino or Pi board. That would in fact be nice, easy, and practical solution. But how would we get such a device to the users? I could provide the neccessary firmware for free. But what about the hardware?

Kickstarter!

What about if the user bought the Pi board and you provided the firmware and instructions, would that work?

Nice work !!!

If there were enough iPhone users willing to buy a board two USB cables, a housing for the board, put it all together and flash some firmware onto it...yes, that would work.