Android Class: Self-aware Chess Pieces (NFC)

Next week, we have a great presentation (https://www.meetup.com/AndroidClasses/events/36294352/) scheduled.

Tonight, we're going to talk about building a Near Field Communication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication)-based chess board proof-of-concept application. And we will be meeting inside the computer lab on the second floor of the library.

I was thinking we could find a very large chess board made of fabric/thin plastic and place a bunch of NFC stickers under each square. This way each NFC phone would be able to simulate a different individual chess piece, and it would be able to know where it was on the board based on the actual sticker it was sitting on (I have an NFC phone and some blank writable NFC stickers already).

I just had this idea today, so nothing is written yet, but we could take this as an opportunity to mock-up an Android application that would mimic a chess piece, and just for now, make the phone say out loud which square it was sitting on every time the phone was moved.

This first iteration would be to only demonstrate the use of NFC and how it could work in real life, and we'd put the resulting code under the Apache license 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html) -- so that others with existing chess engines/applications -- could build upon our work.

Please note that this is not going to be a prepared lecture, but more of a group project where absolutely nothing is prepared. We'll just start researching the idea and may be just try some the existing documented NFC code samples. And don't worry if you know nothing about NFC yet (if your Android development environment is set up, that's enough, but even if you don't feel comfortable coding on top of Android yet, you can always help with taking notes, or searching the web, finding graphics, making mock-ups, etc). Just be sure to bring your own laptop (and some extra NFC-phones if you have some, like I said, I have one already -- which should be good enough for illustrative purposes).

And also, one more end-goal would be that we would eventually get this project working for any NFC-capable OS on the same chess board (not just Android phones). So if your expertise is in something else than Android, like for instance Nokia or Blackberry, you should still come. And then, we could use this project as a kind of Rosetta Stone, assuming we could document it well enough, for developing future NFC tag-based cross-platform applications.