Project Video
Week 11 Status Report – Chris Reed
This week I laser cut our play-area enclosures, set up and hot glued the shufflers into place, and wired together all of the components on our final breadboards for our second play area, community card area, and cleaned up the first play area’s breadboard. We also ran tests on our system as a whole now that it has all come together.
Our schedule is on track, and we are preparing for our final demo in Wiegand Monday morning.
Week 10 Status Report – Team
There have been no design changes and schedule changes this week. Our biggest risk is getting every part of the project working together as one unit. We know all of our individual parts work well, but putting it together cleanly in a nice looking way may be a bit difficult with budget restraints.
This week will be focused on finishing up our presentation and poster, and then putting the finishing touches on our project before our final demo.
Week 10 Status Report – Chris Reed
I spent the first half of this week preparing our card dealer for our in-lab demo. After a lot of prototyping and testing of different orientations of the wheel and dealing tray, I found a reliable positioning to deal out one card at a time. I worked on hot gluing all of the separate 3D printed parts I made together and coordinating with Eric to get the timing on how long to run the server motor to deal out one card and reset the positioning of the deck.
The second half of the week was spent focusing on getting our final presentation slides and poster done with the rest of the team.
Our schedule is on track, and Mark and I be making the permanent fixture for the card shuffler and play areas this week to bring the project all together.
Week 9 Status Report – Chris Reed
This week, Mark and I focused a lot on getting the card shuffler and dealer set up. Now that the final components were printed, we had to work and file down a couple sections that did not work as planned to make more room for our motors to fit in and our cards to go through. We have been setting up and running test circuits with our motors to test the cards shuffling and dealing. We have successfully dealt a card out of our holder with our wheel, but need to work on the positioning of the actual card deck so that the wheel has good access to the deck. We have also successfully gotten the cards to be spit out of the shuffler when we use the motor, but we are ordering one with more torque so it doesn’t get stuck from the weight of the cards on top of it.
Our schedule hasn’t changed much. Mark and I will continue to improve our prototype card dealer and shuffler to have it ready for our demo this Wednesday. Once this is completed, we will start to clean up the wiring and set up of our player area and make an enclosure to more neatly contain it.
Week 8 Status Report – Chris Reed
This past week I focused on 3D printing the rest of our components we needed for our shuffler/dealer mechanism. I now have the two shuffling trays, one player tray, the dealer tray and cylinder. Attached below is a picture.
This week I need to work with Mark on attaching all of our motors to our shuffler and dealer and putting it all together into one unit. Once we have it all set up, Eric can use his driver code he will write so we can test the shuffling and dealing of cards all put together.
Week 7 Status Report – Team
Our demo went very well this week. All of the aspects of our player area are functional and ready to go: We have a full deck of RFID cards that can be detected correctly by our RFID reader, we have a prototype chip with embedded resistor and are able to detect the monetary value of a stack of chips, and we have our E-Ink display hooked up so that it displays the cards and chips of the player in real time.
We have also begun production on our shuffler/dealer, as stated in Chris’ weekly update. We will also begin on working on the central computing unit, so that we can link multiple play areas together now that we have one functioning set. We will continue to work out that before working on incorporating the play area into a more visually pleasing unit.
Week 7 Status Report – Chris Reed
This week I focused on 3D printing parts for our shuffler and dealer. I made modifications to lower the cost of the parts we wanted to print. I was able to get the first one-sixth dealer tray model printed out as well as the dealing platform to hold the deck of cards. Both pieces came out very sturdy, but since we made them very thin the diagonal slope on the dealing tray is a little flimsy so we may support it with a little tape on the back to ensure it doesn’t snap. For the next dealer tray we print, if we have more money, I may make it a little thicker to try and solve this issue.
We are on schedule for our project right now. Next week, I want to print the shuffling platforms and work with Mark to hook up our motors to both the shuffling and dealing platforms so we can practice dealing and shuffling the cards out. Once we know the mechanics work, we can work on putting them all together into one enclosure as a unit.
Week 6 Status Report – Chris Reed
This week I started to 3D print the dealer/shuffler enclosure, but ran into some issues. Our model worked fine, but it was much too large to print and would cost too much. Even after making adjustments to the dealer tray model’s design and material thickness, the cost was still very steep for a full model. We are most likely going to pivot to only printing three card trays rather than six, to still show the rotating functionality of our dealer but not have to pay for a full model. Unfortunately, since each tray would take approximately 23 hours to print, we will not have them ready for the demo on Monday, but we do have the models.
This affects our schedule a little bit because it pushes back testing of the dealer and shuffler, but since we need to 3D print less we are saving time on that. We won’t have to adjust much in the schedule, we will just have to 3D print the trays at the same time as assembling the shuffler and dealer motors this coming week.