Advice request: translucent chess board

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My son is in the process of making an electronic chess board. It will have hall effect sensors and neopixels on the underlying panel and he is pondering how to make the top surface.

We are considering a variety of options involving acrylic sheets and epoxy pours but haven’t settled on a plan. It should have two distinct colors and aloe for some light transmission. He would also like a brass grid inlaid between the squares but I am advocating for something simpler for the first build.

If anyone has tried something similar or has any suggestions I’d live to hear.

Thanks in advance - I truly appreciate the experience and creativity of this forum.

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Epoxy will probably be the easiest. You could engrave out the squares for the white squares and pour, once hard engrave the black and pour. Then go back and engrave a thin line and pour for the grid. You can tint the epoxy so it has the color you want but is not a solid so light will still come through.

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I’ve seen some interesting projects done with lights behind wood veneer.

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Neat project. Roughly what size board are you building?

IF deciding on acrylic, for dark squares, there’s some nice LED diffusing material that looks black/dark-grey when not lit up. E.g. Black LED Diffusion Acrylic Panel - 10.2 x 5.1 [0.1 / 2.6mm thick] : ID 4749 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

Sounds like printed (prototyping and/or final build), or non ferrous metal grid will be used to help isolate/contain light for each square.

Wonder how semi translucent resin print pieces would look when lit up.

Neopixel per square, maybe using LED strips with 1" spacing? LOL, you could use colors to introduce the notion/concept of damage points/percentage instead of instant piece death.

Onyx stone material backlights really nice. Expensive, but Tile/slab samples/remnants could reduce cost.

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something like this?
image
video link

his channel has a lot of different epoxy chess boards for ideas

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For size, he has pcb tiles that are 36mm square that will be arranged into the pattern.
The board will include a boarder with additional hall effect sensors and perhaps indicator lights for the ui.

We played with some epoxy and acrylic yesterday. Epoxy will almost certainty be involved - it was looking good and easy enough to work with. The acrylic milled okay until it stuck to the tool and made a mess. Trying to engrave to a specific depth with a co2 laser showed some promise, but was making the acrylic cloudy.

Thin wood veneer is super intriguing…

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I’d use a piece of glass. I’d use vinyl for the squares, but I’d put the vinyl on the bottom of the glass in the grid pattern. Then I’d mask out a grid on the top and paint lines across the edges of all the squares.

The results would make it look like the chess pieces were floating on the surface.