Alex Angelov, Tim Ness and Alex Smith have teamed up as part of their Real Time Embedded Programming course to build this wonderful game of ‘Ghost Chess’. The system uses a Raspberry Pi to control a robotic arm mechanism with an electromagnet attached. By issuing commands to the Pi, the arm can move into position underneath a chess board and move the magnetised chess pieces to the correct position. The Pi runs an instance of the Stockfish chess engine to allow the computer to try and beat you. They’ve open-sourced everything you need to build your own and have documented it over on GitHub. You can see a video of it in action below (I recommend turning the audio off!):