Fan made ChessUp2 compatible Chess Board Vision Trainer web app

(Link is at the bottom) I had a very strong desire to use a physical board to test board vision drills like they have on Lichess.org and Chess.com. I couldn’t find any existing solutions so I made a web app that can connect to the ChessUp 2 board to be used for Vision practice (it might work for ChessUp 1. I don’t have one of those so I can’t test).

The app let’s you use the webpage chessboard graphic as inputs if you don’t want to use or don’t have a ChessUp board. Once the page opens, you click the “Connect to ChessUp2” button and it will bring up a Bluetooth connection request. Allow it to connect to the ChessUp board and then the UI in the webpage will show the green light when it’s connected. Since it uses Web Bluetooth API, iPhone’s can’t run it with Safari or Chrome but you can use an iPhone browser that does work with Web Bluetooth API. I used Bluefy on my iPhone and it worked. I also tested on an Android phone and it worked too (without needing a special browser). Nothing special is needed on desktop besides Bluetooth, no special browser needed.

There are options to the right of the app (or if you are on mobile, scroll down) that let you turn on “Continue on Wrong Answer” so when you get an answer wrong, it won’t let you guess again and will just move on. This can be toggled on or off. The timer is off by default, so it’s just continuous.

There is also a toggle for the position to be spoken by a synthesized voice. I didn’t want to have to look at the screen and then back at my board, I wanted the positions spoken so I can just keep moving. It uses the web speech synthesis API and I tried to get the clearest voices. There is a voice selection that appears when you toggle on this option. It has a few other voices to select from. Bs, Ds, and Es were hard to distinguish so I make the D spoken slightly lower in pitch, E slightly higher, and B normal.

The app (after connected to the ChessUp board) is meant to handle just 1 piece. Any piece works. The downside is that this only seems to work when the board is first powered on with nothing else is on the board, with the 1st, 2nd, 7th, and 8th ranks remaining lit. If the timer is toggled on, you can place a piece on the board to trigger the start. “Reverse Sides” is only meant for when not using the physical board. You don’t need to use that toggle since you should turn the board around instead.

Thank you, Jeff, for allowing me to post this here! All feedback is welcome. I hope it’s useful to those who want to practice board vision with the ChessUp board. I uploaded a short video of the board being used with the app. The voice is coming from the app, not the board:

I’ll be continuously updating it. The UI is not ideal, especially for mobile :sweat_smile:

Here is the link to the app: https://boardvision-trainer.static.domains/

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Looks nice. Will give it a try soon

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