[Diyguypt] may be an altruist to provide the means for people who can’t manipulate chess pieces to play the game. Or he may just have his hands too busy with food and drink to play. Either way, his voice command chessboard appears to work, although it has a lot of moving parts both figuratively and literally. You can check out the video below to see how it works.

The speech part is handled by an Android phone and uses Google’s voice services, so if you don’t want Google listening to your latest opening gambit, you’ll want to pass this one up. The phone uses an app that talks to the Arduino via Bluetooth, which means the Arduino needs a Bluetooth module.

The Arduino controls what amounts to an upside-down 3D printer. Instead of a hot end pointing down, the mechanism has an electromagnet pointing up. A small washer in the base of each chess piece makes it susceptible to the magnet’s motion. The electromagnet is required to let go of a piece before a move to a new position. It is possible that a small servo moving a permanent magnet closer to the board for a move and away from the board to reposition could do the same job, though we suspect that could be tricky.

We’ve seen this before, often with a Harry Potter theme. We sort of prefer a more obvious chess robot, but that’s just us.

The Amazon Echo is an attempt to usher in a new product category. A box that listens to you and obeys your wishes. Sort of like Siri or Google Now for your house. Kickstarter creator [Joshua Montgomery] likes the idea, but he wants to do it all Open Source with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

The Kickstarter (which reached its funding goal earlier this month) claims the device will use natural language to access media, control IoT devices, and will be open both for hardware and software hacking. The Kickstarter page says that Mycroft has partnerships with Lucid and Canonical (the people behind Ubuntu). In addition, they have added stretch goals to add computer vision and Linux desktop control to Mycroft.

With or without Mycroft, people are going to hack things like this together. If you dream of being able to start your teapot with the command “Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” then Mycroft might be a pretty good leg up on getting started. We’ve also seen Echo integration with Roku and even Nest. We imagine an open platform would spawn a lot of interesting hacks. You can find out more about Mycroft’s plans in the video below.

Robotic hacker [Andrea Trufini] apparently likes choices. Not only does his robotic arm have six degrees of freedom, but it has a variety of ways he can control it. The arm’s software can accept commands through a programming language, via potentiometers, an infrared remote, or–the really interesting part–through spoken commands.

The videos don’t show too much of the build detail, but the arm is mainly constructed of laser cut plywood and uses an Arduino. Hopefully, we’ll see more particulars about the build soon but for now have a look at a similar project.

The software (myrobotlab) is on github and looks very impressive. The Java-based framework has a service-oriented architecture, with modules that support common processors (like the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beagle Board) along with I/O devices (like motors, sound devices, and that Leap Motion controller you just had to buy). As you might expect from the demonstration found below, there are speech to text and text to speech services, too. Like a lot of open source projects, some of these services are more ready for prime time than others but that just means you can contribute your hacks back to the project.

You could build some pretty powerful robots with a framework like this. How powerful? One of the services knows how to play chess.