Our Project

The Product

Before the semester began, the four of us along with some other friends had a scheduled weekly game of Texas Hold ‘Em. None of us are particularly any good, but the evenings of bantering, bluffing, and just talking were weekly highlights for all of us, and it was something we continued into the school year. However, in our poker games, we always ran into a problem - while enjoying each other’s company, whoever was the dealer would often forget to deal and we’d have to interrupt our conversation to remind them to deal out all the cards. It not only interrupted our play, but would also interrupt our conversation, oftentimes breaking off a story half way through its telling. We wanted to create a product that would help alleviate this, allowing for not only a more fun gameplay, but to create something that would be used often and be greatly appreciated.

In brainstorming what we wanted to do, we eventually settled on a product that would add value to our games, would look and feel cool to play with, be theoretically useful to other players, and would present an achievable engineering challenge for us - an automatic card dealer.

Our final product: Automatic Card Dealer

It not only would help streamline the games, but would be a product that could be replicable, sleek, and easy to use. We iterated through many designs and worked with integration into the center of a proper poker table, and eventually settled on a final, portable, singular card table and automatic dealer.

So we present to you: our automatic poker dealer. Set into a low, felt-covered table, the dealer shoots cards out onto a hardboard wooden inset that every player can reach. An LCD screen inset into the table allows for the amount of players to be modified - anywhere from four to eight players - and once the deal button is pressed, the deck will automatically deal out two cards to the set amount of players and create a burn pile as a typical dealer would. The deck of cards can easily be removed, shuffled, and reinserted into the dealer, and the sleek design of the cover allows the dealer to fit naturally within the rest of the table. The dealer allows for smooth, uninterrupted play, and serves as a complex mechanical, electrical, and software engineering project that is replicable and provides a value in play.

Financial Breakdown

Here is our Bill of Materials (BoM) and associated datasheets.

Overall, this project had a total budget of $250, out of which a substantial portion of our materials were gathered for free.