Those who indulge in trading card games know that building the best deck is the key to victory. What exactly that entails is a mystery to us muggles, but keeping track of your cards is a vital part of the process, one that this DIY card scanner (original German; English translation) seeks to automate.
At its heart, [Fraens]’ card scanner is all about paper handling, which is always an engineering task fraught with peril. Cards like those for Magic: The Gathering and other TCGs are meant to be handled by human hands, and automating the task of flipping through them presents some challenges. [Fraens] uses a pair of motorized 3D-printed rollers with O-rings to form a conveyor belt that can pull one card at a time off the bottom of a deck. An adjustable retaining roller made from the most adorable linear bearing we’ve ever seen ensures that only one card at a time is pulled from the hopper onto an imaging platen. An adjustable mount holds a smartphone to take a picture of the card, which is fed into an app that extracts all the details and categorizes the cards in the deck.
Aside from the card handling mechanism, there are some pretty slick details to this build. The first is that [Fraens] noticed that the glossy finish on some cards interfered with scanning, leading him to add a diffused LED ringlight to the rig. If an image isn’t scannable, the light goes through a process of dimming and switching colors until a good scan is achieved. Also, to avoid the need to modify the existing TCG deck management app, [Fraens] added a microphone to the control side of the scanner that listens for the sounds the app makes when it scans cards. And if Magic isn’t your thing, the basic mechanism could easily be modified to scan everything from business cards to old family photos.
Props to the video maker who actually included shots of the device running at the BEGINNING of the video, instead of buried somewhere near the end!
I don’t like spoilers. I prefer chronological videos. You can always fast forward if you are impatient.
Spoiler is an interesting word choice…the machine functioning isn’t a surprise like you’d see in a narrative, so nothing is spoiled by seeing it first. Choosing that word is a subtle way to denigrate people the the opposite preference, pulling in a negative connotation from a completely different context (fictional entertainment).
I prefer X, you shoudl do Y so I can have X.
Either is fine. If the operational video is at the front, those that want to see the build first can skip past it. If it’s at the end, those that want to see it first can skip to the end.
People are way way way too hung up on “spoilers” and “surprises” these days. If I have to skip to the end to see the thing working, which is what I’m interested in seeing first, then chances are likely I’m not going to go back and watch the whole process. If I can see it at the front without having to watch someone gibgab and drag their feet through a 20 minute long explanation/build process that is mostly just to extend runtime of their video for ad dollars, then I’m more likely to watch the rest of the video if it catches my interest.
imo they started it with an image in their head of how it would look when operating, but it’s hard to put a head-image on youtube so the thing stands in as an illustration of itself, at the beginning where the illustration belongs
I had an idea similar to this many years ago – long after I’d gotten out of trading card games – It’s a neat concept and device. I’d imagined a machine that could scan all your cards, and then you could select the deck you wanted to build and put the stack in. It would sort everything out that you didn’t want.
My brother-in-law thought that would take the fun out of the deck building experience. The process of going through your deck and pulling out various cards based on a mechanic or ability.
I’m pleased somebody has built a device that accomplishes the processing part. It’s also nice to see someone be practical about the design: The wires for the RGB LED are just zip-tied to the arm.
Really excellent build!
Well I kind of felt the opposite about practicality. The electronics are fine. Easily sourced modules stuck together with breadboard jumper wire. The hardware (in a traditional sense) looks like it’ll take a few hours to track down and cost a good bit of “mana.”
It’s definitely all good choices. Good hardware makes things work more reliably, but what a pita to acquire in quantities that are exactly what you need for a reasonable amount. Maybe he links to shops, I didn’t check, but then it’s probably not available in my area or costs twice what it should. A few more 3D printed parts or even easier to find parts would have been nice. If you print the gears, why not the rest? That linear rail looks like a misumi or something. They don’t allow private accounts, only corporate accounts. Anyway, it’s feeling too much like my real job just thinking about it. Love the project, might even build one myself, but it looks like you could get away with doing it by hand with the app. Then it might actually be more fun. A trip down memory lane.
The links link to “paid for” downloads of the design files and BOM.
The linear rails are easy to source for ‘next to nothing” (compared to Misumi) on Aliexpress or Amazon. (I’d change that part to use a 3D-print on 3D-print slider, but if you want the linear rails, that’s doable).
Looking on AliExpress for parts for this at the moment, and I’m seeing about a $110 USD cost shipped, which isn’t awful. I have a many-thousand card MTG collection that I want to catalog, and haven’t because manual scanning is an awful chore. Should be at the very easy to recoup that cost actually knowing what my collection is worth
I’d be willing to live without any of the mechanical components and just have the LED ring, a camera mount, and the bits that listen for the app chime to stop cycling the lights, all started with a button press. The TCGPlayer app is awful at scanning foil and special art cards, which are usually the money makers. That problem usually comes down to the camera controls in-app not offering manual focus or brightness control of the camera light.