Carduino

Inspiration

When playing cards with my friends, I noticed that nobody truly enjoyed shuffling and dealing cards. In fact, it was often the loser's responsibility to shuffle/deal. During the game, many players would also complain that the dealer was slow and not shuffling properly. This is what inspired Carduino - an automated shuffling/dealing machine.

What it does

This machine takes in a deck of cards, shuffles them, and distributes them to the table.

How we built it

We lasercut a box to hold all of our electronics. This box contains two ramps at the top, where the two halves of the deck are placed into. Their flow down the ramp is controlled by servo motors on each side, which alternate slowly to give a shuffling effect. The cards are them collected onto a platform that has a motor with a wheel to eject the cards out of the box. There is also an LCD display for users to see the shuffling/dealing state, and an ultrasonic sensor, which upon detecting a player, will begin shuffling.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with having our DC motor support the weight of an entire deck of cards. The motor did not have enough strength with the 5V from the Arduino, so we had to use a MOFSET and connect it to a 9V battery. Also, we had trouble making sure that the cards did not get stuck on their way down through the box.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our ability to make the box look sleek and our overall design. We were able to be conservative with our space, and the project ended up looking better than we expected, which we are proud of.

What we learned

We learned that next time we should do more intense prototyping and design before immediately assembling the project. We definitely could have saved some time in iteration.