dgtchess

dgtchess

A JavaScript connector for the electronic DGT chess board, working both in the browser and node.js.

Browser Usage

The client version relies on the browser's Web Serial API, which is currently supported only by Google Chrome 80 and later and needs to be enabled via the #enable-experimental-web-platform-features flag in chrome://flags.

Because the Web Serial API is available only on modern browsers, it is very likely that you can simply import the provided Board.js as a JavaScript module. The Board constructor expects an open port as returned by the Web Serial API as its first argument.

<button onclick="loadBoard()">Load position from DGT board</button>
<script type="module" src="main.js">
  import Board from 'chessground/Board.js'
  async function loadBoard () {
    const port = await navigator.serial.requestPort({})
    const board = new Board(port)
    const { serialNr, version, position } = await board.reset()
    console.log(serialNr, version)
    console.log(position.ascii)
  }
</script>

In example/index.html, we provide a standalone example web page that loads the DGT chess board's information and dynamically displays the current position:

Usage with node.js

Using npm, you can install dgtchess by calling this:

npm install dgtchess

The node.js version relies on Node Serialport to connect to the DGT chess board. Its path is expected as the first argument of the Board constructor, e.g. /dev/ttyUSB0 on Linux machines. For the node.js version, dgtchess internally maps to Board.node.js which replaces some of the Web Serial APIs by the ones provided by Node Serialport.

import Board from 'dgtchess'
const board = new Board('/dev/ttyUSB0')
const { serialNr, version, position } = await board.reset()
console.log(serialNr, version)
console.log(position.ascii)

This might result in the following output:

13116 1.8
  +------------------------+
8 | .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |
7 | .  .  Q  .  .  .  .  . |
6 | .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |
5 | .  .  .  .  .  .  k  . |
4 | .  .  R  .  .  .  .  . |
3 | .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |
2 | .  .  .  K  .  .  .  . |
1 | .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . |
  +------------------------+
    a  b  c  d  e  f  g  h

Status

The current version of this module uses only the UPDATE BOARD modus and instead of moves, only changes are triggered through the 'data' event.

Background

The protocol for communicating with the electronic chess boards is well documented by DGT in their developer section. There you can find the DGT Electronic Board Protocol Description (version 20120309) which is the base for this JavaScript implementation.