Chessnut Move Development Progress Update

Apologies for keeping everyone waiting! Due to the Chinese New Year holiday in February, which lasted for over half a month, it’s been a while since our last update. Some of you may have noticed reports about delays with the units we sent to YouTubers. That’s indeed the case. Originally, we planned to deliver sample boards to YouTubers for testing between late January and early February. However, in January, our technical team decided to switch to a new networking solution for the chess pieces to enhance the user experience. As a result, we postponed the shipment of the sample boards.

Rest assured, our team has worked hard to minimize the impact of this change on the mass production timeline. Thanks to smooth progress on the mold development, we still expect the first batch to ship by the end of May as planned. In this update, I’ll share the latest progress on both hardware and software aspects.

1. Hardware

a) Electronics

The chessboard’s mainboard has long been finalized and thoroughly tested. Its firmware, including the built-in offline OTB bot game mode, is fully developed. You can check it out here: https://youtu.be/Q85LqVfPhhU. Our current development focus is on the networking control scheme for the chess pieces. After considering multiple factors, we decided in January to revise the networking solution to improve overall performance.

For regular users, the most noticeable improvement will be lower latency and faster response times. Another significant advantage is that the bases of the chess pieces are now universal, with their identities configurable via the app after connection. For example, if you accidentally damage or lose a black pawn, you can easily reassign a spare queen to act as that pawn temporarily to keep playing. Alternatively, you could swap its base onto a new pawn and reach out to our after-sales team to address the damaged piece. This eliminates the frustration of the entire Move product becoming unusable due to a single faulty piece.

b) Structural Components

We’ve completed the molding and trial production of the chess piece bases, including their outer shells and internal components. The latest version of the base offers better consistency, reduced noise, and straighter movement paths compared to the initial prototypes, bringing the pieces’ motion closer to our expectations. Some minor parts of the molds still need refinement, so the final mass-production version will see further improvements. The design of the charging pad's structure has been completed, and the preparation of the molds is now underway. This process is expected to take approximately one month. As a result, the samples currently being shipped are still temporary versions produced via 3D printing.

The molds for the plastic chess pieces are also complete, and we’re about to receive the first injection-molded samples. For the wooden chess pieces, our supplier in India has confirmed delivery by early April. The chessboard’s structure itself was finalized and validated long ago.

The sample units for YouTubers are now ready and scheduled to be shipped to them this week.

2. Software

Previously, we noticed from comments on the release video that many users were dissatisfied with the issue of the chess pieces not being well centered. After investigation, we found the previous alignment issues stemmed from both the algorithm and hardware. The algorithm has now been optimized, and you can see the adjusted performance in the YouTube video above. On the hardware side, we’re refining it for the mass production version. With these combined improvements, the final result will definitely be satisfying. As we’ve mentioned on social media before, there’s a trade-off between precision and speed, so we’ll make this an adjustable setting for users to tweak based on their preference.

 

The image attached outlines our current plans for Move’s features. Functions highlighted in yellow boxes are planned but still under development. We expect all planned features to be fully implemented by the official delivery date at the end of May. If you have any great suggestions, feel free to share them with us anytime!

 

Additionally, we’re planning to have the Move API documentation and development units ready by April for third-party software developers to begin integration. This will enhance Move’s compatibility and versatility.

That’s all for this update. We will continue to update the performance of the latest Move prototypes on Facebook and YouTube, so please stay tuned! Thank you for your continued support, and we’ll keep you posted on further progress! 

 

Cheers,

The Chessnut Team