Point your phone camera at a chess board. Get your next move. No bullshit.
Chess Vision Coach is a lightweight, blazing-fast web application that helps you analyze over-the-board chess positions in real-time. Simply point your smartphone camera at a physical chess board, and the app will instantly suggest the best move using the powerful Stockfish engine.
- Zero-weight Board Detection: Utilizes OpenCV for fast, accurate board detection without the need for heavy GPU models. Perfect for overhead phone cameras.
- Persistent Engine: Stockfish is started once on boot and kept alive for all requests, ensuring zero restart overhead between moves.
- Smart FEN Caching: The engine is only called when the board position actually changes, saving resources and battery life.
- Multiple Play Modes: Choose between "Win Mode" for the strongest possible moves, or "Loss Mode" for more human-like, believable inaccuracies.
- Adjustable Strength: Easily change the engine depth to match your desired Elo rating (approx. 800 to 2600+).
Get your own instance running in under a minute!
# 1. Deploy the Backend to Railway
cd backend && railway up
# 2. Deploy the Frontend to Cloudflare Pages
# - Edit API_BASE in frontend/app.js to point to your Railway URL
# - Push to GitHub and connect in Cloudflare Pages dashboard- Frontend: Pure HTML/CSS/Vanilla JS for minimal footprint. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages for global Edge CDN delivery and custom
Permissions-Policyheaders (crucial for camera access). - Backend: FastAPI providing a robust, async API. Deployed on Railway for easy containerized hosting.
- Vision: OpenCV was chosen over YOLOv8 for its zero-megabyte model size and ultra-fast inference on standard CPUs, making it ideal for the Railway free tier.
- Chess Engine: Stockfish integrated via a persistent, thread-safe service wrapper that auto-recovers from any edge-case crashes.
For more detailed information, check out our comprehensive docs:
Built with ❤️ for chess enthusiasts everywhere.