LEDs look completely wonky, the magnet sensors are not there, hole pattern for through hole parts is inconsistent between pictures and none of them match gerber files or video. Amount of tiles on the board vary between 7 and 9. Size of MCU board relative PCB is way bigger than it should be in real life. And of course MCU board itself is also a mess.
It's already bad for the DIY project, but if you are selling something even a single crappy picture would have been better.
I think photos are real, just focus is screwed up and maybe they added some automatic effects (tilt-shift or blur afterwards). First few seconds of the video are identical and you can see how much camera is fighting to focus when hand appears in the front.
Theyre messed up in a way that would only make sense if the image were AI generated because that pattern is trivially easy for a human to create but difficult for AI to get right.
An image or two afterwards has something strange with a table intersecting a window ledge too. It looks as if the AI attempted to do two images in one (like you see in some pictures of home designs). So I suspect all the images were AI generated but some more effectively than others.
Still I have no idea why one would do that.
The board is very odd.
Did nobody look at the image after they generated it? If they live in a bedsit and don't have a nice windowsill, they could easily generate the background and if the product is vaporware they could drop a rendering over the top - I think that might actually be easier than training an AI on your product... I'll be grumpy at clouds next!
These days, image recognition is good enough that it's probably feasible to just video the chess game on a non-sensory board, and let software figure out what moves were played. In cases of doubt or dispute (blitz scrambles), humans can examine the video.
If anyone cares, the tournament sensory sets that most organizers use are made by DGT and cost around $600 iirc. The magnetic sensor system is very clever and was patented in the 1990s or so, but the patents would be expired by now.
I do think almost all online competitive players don't use anything like that. They play on screen using a full sized screen and a mouse.
The C++ code is a bit naive, but easily extendable to use a proper engine. https://github.com/Concept-Bytes/Open-Chess/blob/main/Chess....
To keep this cost effective at DIY level, it needs to be redesigned in a more modular way for larger sizes instead of having one giant PCB. For DIY project might even handwire it using through hole magnet sensors and addressable LED strip.
Surprisingly quote for 5x64 ~= 350 2x2cm boards was as low $30-$90. I knew it would be cheaper but didn't expect that much. That's assuming I didn't break the quote calculator by hitting a weird edge case. Happy middle ground would probably be 2x40cm strips one per row or something similar.
Also the PCB isn't open source. You only get gerber files not the original project files for schematics or board layout which would be needed to modify it.
I also found a dutch e-paper board but the Chinese looked much better.
I hunted down the Gerbers and uploaded to JLCPCB real quick, the cost for the bare PCB at the current size (218x218 mm) is $22 for 5 pieces, excluding shipping. I thought it was interesting to have as a reference.
Scaling up the PCB is not possible in their web UI since the Gerbers "lock in" the size, of course.
A few wires later and a model scale up and your chess board can be a different size.
I suppose one piece is easier and cleaner, just less flexible.
"I appreciate your work, but that AI generated image is very disturbing and shouldn't be promoting your own work, which is so much more than an AI slab."