Banned from Vegas

This hackathon project is a collaboration between me and 3 amazing teammates. With my passion in cardistry, I successfully convinced my team to make a playing card related robot. Designed and built within 24 hours at MakeHarvard 2020, this is an autonomous card sorter that uses image recognition to identify the suite and number of playing cards and sort them by spitting out individual cards around itself with the turning mechanism. Checkout our Devpost post here.

Details

The robot was conceived through whiteboard sketches and then its structure was modeled in SolidWorks. It consists of a laser-cut main structure that houses the cards and card shooting motors. The base is made of plywood and the whole robot rotates on a wooden track. Mounted at the top of the robot is a Raspberry Pi, camera and touchscreen. This allows the robot to "see" the cards and receive input from a user in a simple and user-friendly way.

As a mechanical engineering major, I along with another teammate, Teddy Robins, designed and built the main body of the robot. Specifically, I designed the upper portion of the robot (the card loading box, the card dispensing system, the mounting plate for all the electronics, and most of the robot's framework), while Teddy made an amazing turntable at the bottom.

One of the biggest challenge of the design is that I had to work with materials available at the competition within a short amount of time. Because of that, the card sorter is completely made of laser-cut materials. This is a challenging part of the design, as we have to think about how we can build sturdy 3D structures out of 2D materials, and assemble them using T-slots and snug-fit joints.

We finished the robot within the competition time and received very positive feedback from the judges. More importantly, the hackathon experience was truely one of a kind, and I can't wait to come back next year and build something even more amazing.