Miro's Blog

In some of my previous posts, I mentioned that I’m a big chess enthusiast. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before I tried to automate the game. Of course, I’m far from the first person to attempt this. There are quite a few automated chessboard projects on YouTube. However, only a small fraction of them appear to be truly functional and reliable. As a starting point, I used this excellent guide from Instructables: https://www.instructables.com/Automated-Chessboard/ The author (Greg06) does a great job explaining both the challenges and the solutions in detail. The project includes a full list of materials and clear assembly instructions. My second source of inspiration was: https://oshwlab.com/skolodi/works This project builds on the same foundation but goes deeper into areas that weren’t fully covered in the original. I actually discovered it through the comments section. In this post, I’ll focus on what didn’t work well in my first attempt and what I would redesign. Where Thi...

As my son gets ready to start school, I wanted to surprise him with something special. Over the past few years, he's developed a strong passion for chess, playing it every chance he gets. So, I thought, why not combine his love for chess with a little lunchtime surprise? The idea was to create a custom chess puzzle that I could print out and include in his lunchbox as a fun note. The Inspiration and the Challenge I had some experience with thermal printers from previous projects, so I decided to use one for this idea. The challenge, however, was to find a way to generate chess puzzles easily. Creating puzzles manually would be too time-consuming, so I needed a reliable source of puzzles. As far as I know, two major chess platforms offer puzzles: Chess.com and Lichess. Fortunately, Lichess is open source and provides access to a vast database of chess puzzles . This made it the perfect choice for my project. Turning Puzzles into Printable Images With the puzzles secured, the next st...

I’ve always been a huge coffee lover. The smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning is something I can’t start my day without. However, like many others, I often find myself pressed for time, especially in the mornings. The usual process of making coffee with my machine, while not overly time-consuming, involved pressing a few buttons and waiting around for about three minutes. It’s not a lot of time, but enough to make me think: "Can this be done faster?" So, I decided to take on a fun and slightly geeky challenge to automate my coffee-making process using a Raspberry Pi. What started as a simple idea for a hackathon at work has now become a fully functional setup that I’ve been using for over six months! The Coffee Machine Hack Here’s how I turned my regular coffee machine into a remote-controlled, automated coffee-making station: Step 1: Disassembling the Coffee Machine The first step was to carefully disassemble my coffee machine. I needed to access the internal contr...