The most significant risk that is going to jeopardize our project’s success is attempting to build the card shuffler and dealer. None of the members of our team have extensive experience with electromechanical work, so making sure that we create a good apparatus and hook up all of our motors, gears and wheels to correctly move the cards around may be more difficult than we anticipate. We have been researching other people’s projects online who have tackled these tasks in search of inspiration and guidance on how to go about designing our mechanisms. We will also be taking apart an electric card shuffler that we already own to see its inner workings to help with our design as well. We have a couple of contingency plans in place. If we cannot get either part to work, we could always just purchase an automatic card shuffler and deal manually, but that takes away a big component in our project. If we get our shuffler to work but not our dealer, we can also deal manually. If only our dealer works, we could either shuffle manually or purchase a card shuffler and then place the shuffled deck into the automatic dealer to get the game started.
Instead of using an RC circuit and measuring the discharge time to figure out our resistance for our chip detector, we chose to purchase current sensors we can hook up to the Raspberry Pi because they are much more accurate. We will be shifting the schedule around a little bit due to the parts that will be coming in next week. There is somewhat more work associated with this approach, as the current shunt we have chosen is an I2C device. This means we will need to find an I2C library for python or write the code ourselves in C. There are a number of good I2C libraries available so this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The current shunt also costs more, but less than $10, and we only need one per play area.
Eric will be writing the game components this coming week as opposed to a week from now because we don’t anticipate getting the parts we’ve ordered this week. This will allow us to stay on schedule and begin writing code for the sensors once we receive them and the Raspberry Pis.