Welcome Lichess Boards

That's one of the pro features of CERTABO, you don't have to wait for the vendor, their software is open source and the protocol from the board is dead simple (it just transmits RFID chip numbers for each field as ascii test, and you can send 64bit to it to control the LED). My lichess certabo client has some minor issues that I still need to shake out, but I was playing human vs human on lichess already with the physical board.

  Does anyone think it’s feasible to simply write some software that uses a webcam to “read” the current state of the board?
  Obviously, the lighting in your room would need to be good, and the camera angle just right, and the pieces something closely conforming to Staunton. But the camera could be black & white, and its framerate quite low; it would only need to register large changes on the board (not adjustments within squares, but pieces actually changing squares), which could be predicted via motion detection whenever your hand enters the frame. Once you withdraw it again, the software simply compares the board at that time to the way it was in the last static frame, then updates the game state accordingly.
  Alternatively, you could just press a button after each move, to take a snapshot. Then it simply compares the last two snapshots, and updates the online board to reflect any (legal) change between them. And that’s all it would need to do; no video feed required, just periodic photos.
  I know it’s possible to write software that recognizes human faces; surely, telling knights from pawns would be a relatively simple task. And it seems to me any cheap webcam would suffice for the purpose. Really, I think this is far less complicated than the typical concept of an e-board, with sensors or magnets or chips inside all the squares & pieces. And besides a relatively standard-looking chess set, people would only need to buy the camera & software, so probably anyone could afford to “go electric.” 🙂
  What are your thoughts about this idea? If you foresee any major hurdles, what are they?

@harihurtig where is your code ? do you use github ?

@pawnedge it's already work, I have see some project like that sample :
http://webcamchess.fr/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VawgBIQsjTo

Awesome! I knew I couldn’t be the first person to have this idea. I hope that project becomes a big success. Thanks for sharing the video. 😎

I have tried webcamchess. Works great. Might get your account flagged though (according to lichess mod). Really neat idea.

Indeed; it should use the Board API.

Here's the Certabo client: github.com/haklein/certabo-playground @bichopebitou

This may be well worth forking out 200 dollars for a board.

@TheDudeAbides - which one is 200$? The cheapest certabo i found is 330 - first model on che chessboard product page - there is also Angel chessboard there :)

DGT is around 250 euro, economic version with plastic pieces

I asked DGT if they would develop a client for the lichess board api and received the following reply from DGT:

Thank you for your e-mail.

We recently heard that there’s a new API of Lichess which should enable DGT e-Boards.

At the moment we haven’t tested this API. Our development team will test this. We’re not developing anything new with Lichess.

Chess.com is compatible to use with our e-Board.

Take a look at it.

@sandhom a pity that DGT appears to be unwilling to implement lichess support.. In the meantime, I do play with my CERTABO board already :-)