Ace

Learn to play blackjack, but without a dealer!

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Inspiration

Our brainstorming began one afternoon during lunch. We all enjoyed playing card games so often times as we ate we would play a few rounds of some game. However, someone always gets stuck as the dealer. Seeing that BuildGT was around the corner we brainstormed a solution to our problem - thus the idea for Ace was born. We wanted to automate the process of dealing in games like blackjack where the dealer doesn’t really play. Additionally we wanted for the dealer to keep track of the game details namely whether a player went over 21.

What it does

Ace on a hardware level is a casing for playing cards. The hardware releases cards one at a time to each player. Before releasing a card the card is read using OpenCV Vision processing. In order to interact with Ace the user will use voice commands through the Google Assistant. All of the game data is run on on the Raspberry Pi, which is the central component of this mechanism.

How we built it

We built this by splitting into two teams, one focused on the software aspects and another focused directly on the hardware involved. We met at the end to fuse what we had done together.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the biggest challenges we ran into were the design and fabrication process taking much longer than we anticipated. While we had originally intended to leave plenty of time for testing and refinement, we got bogged down toward the middle process of fabrication and getting a working design. In addition, the project we selected depended heavily on every part working and did not allow for much decrease in functionality to otherwise become useless, so thus we had to ensure every part was at bare minimum functional to produce the end result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our user interface and linking into the google assistant, as well as producing a piece of hardware, while not as flashy or functional as originally planned, is able to accomplish the task we outlined. In addition, the possibilities for future expansion excite.

What we learned

I learned about navigating through an existing project - specifically with vision processing. I had to scrap bits and pieces of an existing library to get the effect I wanted. The library was at times difficult to follow so I gained a lot of experience with tracing. - Simar

I learned that for projects like these you have to be open to adaptation. Multiple times we cut our losses with a certain approach and if we hadn’t we probably would never have actually finished - Ananth

This project was informative about the process of producing a finished work in Solidworks. It involved putting together a design that was easy to put together as well as functional. - Naman

I learned how difficult it is to properly produce a PCB manually, as well as the risks of rushed soldering that would lead to more time later being used to clean up the original work - Arvind

What's next for Ace

We believe that, with some refinement, this would be a great tool to teach blackjack and other card games to new players. With the hardware setup, we can add the ability to eject cards while flipping them, as well as more software to extend this to more games besides just blackjack.

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