MTG_Scanner

Magic The gathering card scanning & sorting machine

Current rev : 3

Read cards
Open correct filters
~2sec per card
Store results in json file for later referencement

This is based on the card reference ad the bottom of the card, references were introduced in 2015, so this is not ideal for old cards, but whatever, it'll do for now. Rev 4 will read card title and do more, but that means getting whole card database from MTG, ect ect. Bleh.

How it works

Hardware side, the machine roll a card from the card dispenser, takes a picture with the camera, software magic happen to read the card, then open the corresponding filter and drop the card in the right bin.
Software side, we use OpenCV to cleanup & threshold the image, then send it to Tesseract OCR that will give us a text string from an image, after that the software parse the string using some regexps and voila, we have the card number, extention, language and type.

Why ?

We bough 15.000 cards from a guy in a garage sale. After an hour of sorting & referencing ~1000 i got bored. So i spent the next month building something to do it automatically. I am not a smart man. Edit : we bought another 20k+ cards. Cards, cards everywhere.

Software versions & requirements

Python 3.4

Name	Description
Pillow	Image manipulation library, required for pytesseract.
pytesseract	Wrapper around Tesseract OCR, see https://pypi.org/project/pytesseract/#installation for more installation instructions
mtgsdk	Will use later, wrapper for easy calls on MTG official API to get card datas
opencv-contrib-python	OpenCV (cv2) is a huge and powerfull image manipulation library, but it's hard to setup on raspberry. I followed http://www.life2coding.com/install-opencv-3-4-0-python-3-raspberry-pi-3/ and had a few problems but got it working in the end

Various required packages for tesseract, opencv, ect ect

sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev
sudo apt-get install libhdf5-dev
sudo apt-get install libhdf5-serial-dev
sudo apt install libqtgui4
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr

Arduino

To speed up input/output : https://github.com/mmarchetti/DirectIO

Parts used

Name	Description & usage	Image
Raspberry 3 B+ (1)	The brain of the operation, ~30€
Arduino pro mini (~3/4+)	Used to drive the servos. A servo need a PWM signal, this type of arduino has 6 PWM pins, so 6 servos max per arduinos. They can be linked to handle 16/32/64 ... servos.
Dupont wires (a LOT)	Buy a lot of them and watch them spread all around your workbench.
Stepper motor Nema 17 40Ncm (1)	Much torque, such precision (1.8°), very power (1.7A). Wow. Commonly found in cheap ass 3d printers (~10€/u).
Stepper motor driver board L298N (1)	Required, or no vroom. ~5€/u
Small servomotor SG90 (10+)	Used to move the filters, linked to the arduinos. ~2€/u
Photo sensor (1)	Used to detect if a card is right under the camera
USB Camera 'microscope' (1)	Not realy a microscope, ok magnification, manual calibration, with built in lighting. ~30€.
Lego (1 fuckton)	I don't have a CNC, but i've gathered the whole family Lego fortune.	-
Weird power supply (1)	I reconverted an old computer power supply, thank to our friendly german Great Scott for that trick. It's probably unsafe but heh.	-