Monster Chess

Over 100,000 Lego pieces, 4 people a year to create, and a 12 foot by 12 foot chess board make this the largest most awesome Lego hack we’ve ever seen. Take that Lego Printer.

For a mere $30,000 you too can have such a setup. Not a lot of information is out yet, but we do know all the pieces are remote controlled via a PC with LabVIEW and a total of 38 NXT controllers are used. Oh, and of course you can see it live at the 2010 Brickworld. Check out a video of a replayed game after the jump.

[via Geekologie]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAwwKEXn6Mk&feature=player_embedded%5D

24 thoughts on “Monster Chess

  1. Now I’m tempted to go dig up my 5,000 Lego bricks out of the attic and see if any of the little neighborhood kids will donate theirs so I can make a giant Lego Go board. Or maybe backgammon.

    I’d imagine that they could very easily convert this to a checkers set if they wanted to, which would be even better bragging rights (as if having the world’s largest Lego chess set isn’t enough…)

    My only issue with it is the amount of time from when you make the move on the screen to when it actually finishes the move. I’d be too tempted to go pick it up and just move it. But still. So freaking awesome.

  2. @kristian
    LabVIEW is the official software for use with Lego NXT,in fact it even comes bundled with a heavily cut down version so you can’t use it for anything else.

  3. Very impressed! But I am a little picky:

    It move be way cooler if the capture is done by first moving the chess and removing the one being captured. Sometime it is hard to figure out why one is captured.

    The diagonal movement is very nice. I wonder why the knight does not move diagonally?

    The white knight seems to be misaligned in at least one move, but the next scene shows it in the aligned position. Seems like someone moved the knight manually in between.

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