Week 3 Status Report – Chris Reed

This week on the project, I worked on incorporating the dealer tray I designed last week into the full shuffling/dealing apparatus, as well as setting up the RFID Reader to test if and how it works.

After some discussion about the dealing apparatus, Mark and I decided it would be easier to have the automatic dealer be the thing that rotates towards each player’s tray to give them a card. Mark will be designing the dealer, while I worked on modifying my dealing tray design to have supports on top where we can place our shuffling device. I designed small pillars and an upper platform where I will be able to position the shuffler on once the final design for the automatic dealer is done and I know where exactly we need to feed the shuffled cards into. I have attached a picture of the Solidworks model for the dealer tray/supports below.

Now that all of our parts were in, Eric and I started to set up the RFID reader/writer with our Raspberry Pi Zero. As Eric installed all the necessary libraries on the Pi, I wired up our RFID reader to the Pi and put one of our extra RFID stickers on a spare playing card I had. After adjusting where the card was and making sure all the wiring were plugged in tightly and correctly, we started detecting the RFID tag through the playing card when it was placed near the reader. I have attached a picture of the initial set up below.

As of right now, since we modified our schedule to not waste time waiting for parts to come in, we are on schedule. Next week, we have a few goals we want to reach before we all leave for spring break so that we can remain on schedule. For the RFID playing cards, I want to be able to work with Eric to write code on the Pi that will allow me to encode the RFID stickers with the encoding scheme I came up with for rank and suit, so that we will have a fully encoded deck of RFID cards to work with. I also want to coordinate with Mark to have a full Solidworks model done of the card shuffler/dealer before break, so that once we get back from break we can get to work on constructing our prototype.