The hardware for the vision system included a Silicon Graphics digital camera attached to a Silicon Graphics O2 workstation running SGI's version of UNIX, called IRIX. The camera was mounted above the chess board using an adjustable metal arm. As the camera is not designed to be mounted, scotch tape was used to keep it in place. SGI's proprietary image capture software was used to take the pictures of the board.
All of the image processing took place on a dual Pentium III-500 machine with 256 MB RAM running RedHat Linux. The software used for the image processing was developed by the vision team, and is detailed in section 2.