Someone made a microcontroller-powered chess bot you can challenge online, and it’s open source

If you love chess but don’t have the time to play it, why not make a little microcontroller to do all the games for you? That’s what one person did when they developed an AI living on a microcontroller named after the developer’s pet dog. The best bit is, if you think you can take it on in a game, you can head over to Lichess and play against it.

This microcontroller lets you challenge a dog to chess (technically)

As spotted by Hackaday, a tinkerer called Folkert van Heusden created a microcontroller that plays chess online. Named after Folkert’s pet, it’s called “Max the Dog” (or just “Dog” for short), and it makes its home on an ESP32 board. The build itself is very simple—its most exciting feature is an array of three LEDs that light up to represent what Dog is thinking about and if it has encountered an error.

However, its main draw isn’t its looks. The primary goal of Dog is to await challengers on the popular chess website Lichess and thwart anyone who thinks they can topple it. If you’re feeling brave and think you can take down this tiny circuit in a game, head over to MaxtheDog-ESP32’s Lichess page and give it all you’ve got. You can also check out MaxtheDog, which is the same deal, except it’s running on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Alternatively, you can use Dog’s source code to make your own chess bot. Maybe you could even challenge Dog with your own bot and see which silica comes out on top. If you’re interested, you can read more about how Dog was made on the Van Heusden blog and check out all the code on GitHub.