Card sorting / Dealing Robot

Project Description

I built this robot along with 3 other Tufts students as part of the annual MakeHarvard competition. We had 24 hours to design and build any project of our choice. We decided to make a robot that could use image recognition to sort a deck of cards by suit or by rank, and then deal them out in a circle. This also meant the machine could be used simply to deal a deck of cards randomly, face down. 

I spent most of my time contributing to the rotation mechanism, that we dubbed, the mechanical lazy susan. It went through many design iterations, increasing in size and complexity in each one, as other parts of the robot were developed. For example, after realizing that the camera need to be farther away from the cards than we initially envisioned, we needed to widen the base to reduce the chance of toppling over. Another change was caused by our realization that using a stepper motor to turn the lazy susan would require too much energy from our raspberry pi, as a result I designed a compact turning mechanism that used two servos and three gears.

The final result was a very smooth and precise 360 degree mechanical lazy susan driven by two servos. It used bearings, laser cut tracks and gears, and a chunk of wood as the base. 

I also worked a little bit on the top sheet of acrylic that was used to mount all of the electronics. The challenge with that piece was mounting all the electronics in a way that was aesthetically pleasing to the judges, but also easy to access in case we needed to modify the circuit. 

Our final product was a (mostly) functional robot and a cool learning experience! Thanks MakeHarvard!