robotic card sorter

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dry cereal
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robotic card sorter

Post by dry cereal » Thu Apr 02, 2009 10:01 pm

Hey...I guess this is news...

I am building a robotic card cataloger.
It is going to catalog the cards that are input to the machine into a spreadsheet. I am starting with english. 3 questions come to mind:

1. How would you want the cards sorted (color, rarity, etc) (please dont say alphabetically)

2. How many people are interested in owning one?

3. Are you willing to pay for one, if so, how much?

Some of you may remember I wanted to do this a few years ago but my lab partner vetoed it. Well, I'm doing it now :).

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mystical_tutor
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Post by mystical_tutor » Thu Apr 02, 2009 10:20 pm

A question. Does this physicaly arrange cards or just card data?
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dry cereal
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Post by dry cereal » Thu Apr 02, 2009 10:26 pm

the hope is to arrange the cards, but it may just do card data. Depends how well the OCR goes to see if we'll have time.

Oh yeah, donations are welcome :)

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magic-belgium
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Post by magic-belgium » Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:00 pm

I don't understand. Could you please explain again how it would work ?

Thank you !

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dry cereal
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Post by dry cereal » Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:13 pm

You put the cards to catalog into a box. Then the machine flips through the cards and reads the card names optically without damaging them....and that's it...

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magic-belgium
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Post by magic-belgium » Fri Apr 03, 2009 12:14 am

I've thought of a machine like this to sort cards.

If you made it, it would be cool (expensive ?)

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dry cereal
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Post by dry cereal » Fri Apr 03, 2009 12:26 am

probably not prohibitively. parts should be between 1 and 500 dollars, but I haven't built one yet, so I don't know. right now I'm working on the OCR, which is really interesting. :)

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magic-belgium
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Post by magic-belgium » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:14 am

Good luck !

stratego
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Post by stratego » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:20 pm

Hi,
Great, I'm interested.

1. In this sort order:
Language
Foil/unfoil
Edition
Rarity
Color
Alphabetically Name
Art Version (eg. Alliances)

2. I want to owe one!

3. I would pay up to $1000 if I really could use it.


I guess you need to read the
name,
edition symbol,
date/copyright
of the card to find out all different types.
And the foil star for the older foils

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Post by Gryfalia » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:35 pm

I think you might be wildly underestimating the cost of such a machine, especially if you expect it to be able to sort and store (which would be very cool). My sister actually owned a company that did OCR work for the legal profession and the hardware for simple text scanning wasn't that cheap..;-)

That being said, best of luck, and if a machine could take a nearly endless stack of cards, scan, count and sort them, it would be worth thousands (which, if it really worked, I would pay).
He's just this guy, ya know?

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dry cereal
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Post by dry cereal » Fri Apr 03, 2009 8:39 pm

well, you are probably hooking the device to your computer, so that part isn't too expensive, or is already payed for.
Do you think cataloging all the cards without sorting will be useful at all? That is the main goal of the project. I 'may' be able to sort according to color or have it customizable for rarity or language or some such. The problem arises when there are too many piles. Of course you could do binary sorting and feed the cards in multiple times, so that's an option, but depending on the speed of the machine, may not be realistic.

Questions regarding other languages: are there "characters" for the language? If yes, is the font set available. I currently have the English font set, which I got from a link on this forum. German/Spanish/French/Portuguese/... do they use the same font-set? If it isn't the same font-set, would it be close? I'm relatively confident I can read casting cost and card name. The "future shifted" cards may be difficult to read...but I haven't really tried, so who knows. Depending on my set-up, copyright line may be difficult to read. It depends on the quality of the image from the camera. A pipe-dream of mine is to be able to do condition estimates and store images of the cards. It would be completely unbiased. That is a more ambitious project I may or may not ever get too. (we can save it for grad school :) )

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Gary_a_Getty
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Post by Gary_a_Getty » Fri Apr 03, 2009 11:10 pm

Maybe you can ask an help to this guy ..... :-P ... :-\'

http://www.magicardreader.com

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Post by Gary_a_Getty » Fri Apr 03, 2009 11:13 pm

"And on Friday he proudly told me what her favorite thing in the whole world is: It is sorting Magic cards! This is extremely useful when new sets come out, when there is a rotation in standard or when loads of forgotten cards are rediscovered in a box in the basement.

Not everyone can be as lucky as Rich. But for everyone who isn't, there may be hope: Italian engineer Marco Orlandi is developing a card reading machine that is quite marvellous. He uses a standard scanner combined with some software he developed. The scanner will automatically scan the cards one by one, and the software will them compare them to a database. The end result is a list of the cards that were entered. He got the idea when he saw how long deck registration takes at tournaments, but the people most interested in the machine may be the dealers with the millions of cards in their inventories. "

From http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/E ... ir07/blog2

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dry cereal
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Post by dry cereal » Fri Apr 03, 2009 11:19 pm

cool! I'll totally contact this guy Has anyone seen this? Does it go fast? How many cards can you load? can it damage the card?

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Post by jamesbond » Sat Apr 04, 2009 8:26 am

dry cereal wrote: Does it go fast? How many cards can you load? can it damage the card?
-Time depends of the scanner rapidity.

-Cards are loaded 20 by 20 >:-( (it's really not enought)

-Yes it can damage the card (with this type of scanner)

But i think the program is a good base of reflection for your program.
(i think a good machine should absolutly do better things than only recognise cards by imges, because they a so many exeptions in magic).

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