Sprint One

Our first sprint was mainly prototyping our ideas and figuring out how to automatically deal a card. Originally, the roller to shoot out the cards was at the top of the deck holder. However, cards were dealt very inconsistently. To mitigate this, we came up with the idea of a gate to limit the number of cards that were ejected. However, by dealing from the top of the deck, this gate would have to lower as cards were dealt. To simplify this process, we switched to dealing from under the deck, as shown in the final product. This allows the gate to remain stationary. We also determined that a weight on the deck of cards would help with consistent shooting, as the right amount of weight allows cards to be ejected without ejecting many at once. By the end of this sprint, we had successfully created a card dealer that could eject a single card consistently.

Sprint 1 Card Dealer CAD dealing from the top

Sprint 1 Card Dealer

Pan Mechanism

At the end of sprint one, the pan mechanism consisted of one external and internal spur gear and used a DC motor to drive. The platform was being supported by a fixed central pillar and as a result did not spin smoothly. The rough spinning was also due to the platform being tilted. Also, the dc motor did not allow for precise spinning, meaning the shooter was not positioned correctly for dealing to each player. To address the tilt we added two support gears at equal sections of the platform as seen in our final design. We also removed the central pillar to reduce friction. For more precise spinning we planned on switching out the DC motor with a stepper motor. During this time firmware for stepper motor was written so that when we swapped out motors in the next sprint we could jump straight into using the stepper motor.

At the end of our first sprint, this was our deliverable: