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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.

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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.

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Week 2 Status Report- Mark McKinzie

Individual Status Update

This week my primary goal was to fabricate an initial prototype for the embedded resistor poker chip and to design a CAD model of the shuffler and dealer prototype. Since the poker chips we ordered did not arrive this week I was unable to fabricate this prototype.

Due to this delay I focused more on the CAD model and selecting mechanical and electrical components which will be used to drive the automated shuffler and dealer. There are RC wheel 360 degree servo motors which come with attached wheels with rubber tread, which will provide a simple dealing mechanism, dealing from the bottom of the deck of cards. to shuffle the cards, high speed DC motors will be used to drive two sets of gears, one to grab one card at a time and push it towards the shuffling area, and the other to push the cards together in the shuffling area. I observed this gear design in existing shufflers which will provide better interleaving results than a system with only one pair of gears. The shuffler model is displayed later in the post, and Chris has the dealer model in his post.

The motor driver used to drive all of these motors will be the L293D, which can drive two DC motors each and one servo motor each, so we need three, one for dealer rotation, one for card dealing, and one for the two high speed DC shuffling motors. I will work with Eric to ensure he is able to write software for these motors which will integrate with the rest of the game environment

I am on schedule for the playing area and the shuffler/dealer. However to catch up on the poker chips I will fabricate and test the initial prototype so I can move onto finalizing the design in a couple of weeks.

Next week I intend to CAD a model of the full playing area, as we will know the physical design for all components in the playing area. I also will fabricate the poker chip prototype for the $5 chip and test this prototype. If that goes smoothly I will fabricate the $50 and $10 chips.

 

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Week 1 Status Report – Mark McKinzie

Mark McKinzie – Team C8

This week I researched which parts we would need for the chip value detection system. This included choosing resistor values corresponding to the chip values which were chosen as follows $50 = 2kOhms $10 = 10kOhms $5 = 20kOhms These high resistance values were chosen in order to reduce the error in calculated chip value. The most necessary part to order was the poker chips themselves, I chose a basic plastic chip, but if necessary we could potentially 3D print custom chips based on the CAD model I created. Though even if we use the premade chips, our resistor embedding will look like the CAD model anyway. In addition we purchased some current sensors which will make chip value reading much easier, with the raspberry pi zeros, only needing to use the voltage into the chips and out of the chips and the current value measured by the sensor to know the total resistance and thus the total chip value.

For the play area we looked into purchasing a mat, but decided not to do that yet, before having all the components which need to be inserted into said play area.

For the shuffler and dealer I looked into examples of automated shufflers and dealers to see which gears and motors would be needed. Since we will probably 3D print or assemble our module out of acrylic, I did not research form factors yet, as that will depend on how the motors, gears, and wiring all fit together. Small high speed motors will initially push the cards together to shuffle them as well as eject cards from the dealing part of the module, whereas a higher torque servo motor will handle the rotation of the module to allow dealing to certain areas. Since only the servo motor requires PWM and the high speed motors are simply run by DC it will run easily from the Raspberry pi. I researched gears for the automated shuffler but could not get any definitive measurements, so this coming week I will order a gear set with many different sizes so I can experiment which of them work best for optimal performance while still keeping the model as small as possible, however I feel I am in a good place knowing what will be driving the module.

I am on progress as I have created a model for the chip and chosen resistance values, so the next step is prototyping, which is what I intend to complete next week. For the play area we are a little behind not having chosen a form factor, but I am confident I can decide that as well as making the CAD model next week. For the shuffler and dealer next week I want to order the gears and motors so the following week Chris and I can begin prototyping.