Posted on

Week 4 Status Report – Mark McKinzie

Early this week I worked on completing and editing the design review document. In addition I completed my ethics case study assignment.

Due to the setback on the poker chip construction we needed to order new chips and they did not arrive this week so I was unable to complete any work on that aspect of the project.

Chris and I completed the full Solidworks assembly of the shuffler and dealer combined module. The picture of that will appear in his report.

This week was not hugely productive but that owes to the fact that I had a midterm in 18-491 that spent much of my time studying for.

Next week I plan to fabricate 3 poker chips, one for each value: $5, $10, $50. I also plan to flesh out the specifics of which parts of the shuffler will be 3D printed and which will be manually fabricated. If time remains I will build a play area contact for the chips.

Posted on

Week 3 Status Report – Eric

Work Update

Last week I worked on finalizing the architecture of the software. I mentioned in my blog post that the block diagram was not yet done, but would be finished for our design review presentation. It encompasses all of the software and the hardware components that it needs to interact with.

Along similar lines, I also worked to complete the slides, as well as develop my presentation for, the design review. As when I helped craft the proposal presentation, I wanted to create a presentation that told a story. In that case we wanted to have a compelling narrative around bringing professional features to the home game. We wanted to have the same points here, but told through the lens of a development story. The goal was to lay out how we were going to bring the experience to life. I also spent a significant amount of time practicing in advance of actually giving the presentation.

Also this week, I went through the process of setting up one of the Raspberry Pi Zeros. This included work to burn new SD cards with the latest versions of Raspbian, set up SPI and I2C, configure networking, enable persistent access, and more. I then worked with Chris to build out a small circuit to prototype our various sensors.

Once the Raspberry Pi was set up, I began working on drivers for the RFID reader and current shunt. I began by using a high level library to interact with them and verify that they were functioning as expected. I then began to write our custom drivers on top of the libraries I mentioned in a previous blog post. This work will continue into next week.

Schedule Update

Progress is still on schedule. Preparation for the presentation took more time this week than I anticipated, however I still manage to make good progress on the drivers. Next week I will finish them, and being working on the e-ink display drivers.

Posted on

Week 3 Status Report – Mark McKinzie

Mark McKinzie – Team C8

This week I as well as working on the design review document, and giving feedback to Eric on his practice design review presentations, I worked on designing the dealing module of the automated shuffler and dealer. As seen below it is a card tray mounted on a cylinder which will be rotated by the servo motor and wheel on the bottom. In addition I cut out a piece of the cylinder in order to accommodate the servo and wheel which which physically deal the cards. This will fit inside the tray that Chris designed and will have the shuffler from my report last week on top of it.

In addition I worked on fabricating the custom poker chip with embedded resistor. As is displayed below I drilled into the chip 4 times to create a slot for the resistor to fit in. However I hit a roadblock when I discovered the chips we purchased have a metal plane inside the plastic exterior of the chip. When I soldered the resistor into the chip and measured the resistance on either end of a 20k resistor and read 0.2 ohms. The good news is drilling and fabricating this chip did not take me much time, and it will be even easier to drill through a purely plastic chip. The bad news is we must obtain different chips to work with and that will take time.

Progress is on schedule for the shuffler/dealer and next week Chris and I plan to merge the three designed assemblies together and have a final design to present. Progress for the poker chips is behind, but I can catch up next week simply by fabricating many chips, as I know the method of fabrication works, even some of our construction is faulty. I hope to have 1 chip of each value fabricated next week, as well as fabricating one contact for the chips which will rest in the play area.

Posted on

Week 3 Status Report – Team

Team C8

The most significant risk of the project remains the shuffler and dealer. This risk is being managed by modularizing the shuffler and dealer, so that even if the shuffler or dealer does not work, the other aspect will not be affected, but in the successful case in which they both work, they are designed to work together. However if neither work, it is not hugely detrimental to the central poker experience which our project aims to create.

There have been no changes to the design of the project or to the schedule.

Posted on

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.