If you’re playing Texas Hold’em or other card games with a small group, you may get tired of shuffling over and over again. [3dprintedLife] was in just such a position, and realized there were no good automatic card shufflers in his budget. Instead, he elected to build one, and put in some extra functionality to corrupt the game to his whims.
The mechanicals of the machine took much development, as accurately handling and dispensing cards is a challenge, particularly with the loose tolerances of 3D printed parts. After developing a reliable transport mechanism, it was more than capable of shuffling a deck well with some basic commands.
However, the real magic comes from installing a camera and Raspberry Pi running OpenCV. This is capable of reading the value and suit of each card, and then stacking the deck in a particular order to suit the dealer’s wishes. It’s all controlled through a web interface and is capable of creating guaranteed wins in Blackjack and Texas Hold’em. Files are on Github for those eager to delve deeper into how the machine works.
The mechanism does such a beautiful job of shuffling, that your friends may not even notice the ruse. It goes to show that you should always have your wits about you when gambling with the aid of machines. Of course, if you wish only to create havoc, this Lego card machine gun may be more your speed. Video after the break.
[via Reddit]
Like the visible mechanism, rather slow but with a little work on the wiring it becomes an object of Art as well as a functional loaded shuffler…
That said I’d say you are wrong Lewin to malign the fleshy dealers by saying ‘you should always have your wits about you when gambling with the aid of machines.’ A human dealer can easily do much the same thing and with practice you won’t know they have. Playing any gambling game needs to have your wits about you or be played with friends – you can trust to either not cheat Or at least make up for it by buying all the pizza with everyone else’s money….
This is an awesome bit of engineering.
Computer dealers are standard for bridge competitions for loading computerized dealt hands with various parameters for eampl high card count, suit lengths etc etc these have been for a long time!
Banned from Vegas in 3… 2… 1…
Excellent engineering work, great videography.
“Oh, but I have degenerative muscular disease in my hands, and I NEED this device to hold my cards.
Are you discriminating against a disabled person?”
B^)
Oh cool beans my project made it on hackaday :D
It’s really nice. The deck-stacking feature really sets it apart.
It is really nice!
I have friends that really can’t shuffle or someone gets blamed for bad shuffling.
This solves the issue! I also looked at shuffling machines but like you said they are really expensive!
Thank you, great video to watch :)
Beautiful work.
I was reading a book about card magic the other day. One of the things the writer mentioned was that the first shuffle, no matter how well or badly done, does very little to actually disorder a new (ordered) deck. It’s trivial to recreate the order and you have a pretty good idea of what’s next in the deck if you see one card. That same situation holds for two, three, four, and five shuffles, but after six shuffles there’s what he characterized as a phase transition and the randomness increases enormously. The context was the writer trying to reverse-engineer a 1930’s card trick where the magician ran an advertisement that said “send me a new deck of cards you’ve shuffled once or twice, then pulled a card off the top and stuck it in the middle, and I’ll tell you the card” and everyone was saying “that’s impossible.”
Properly blackjack (and probably poker) involves discarding a random number of cards off the top after shuffling.