Double Down

This entry contains the continuation of our project propsal, found here, and continuing from here.

The following is taken from our project proposal:

3.2 Card Reading

The card reading layer will be necessary for determining what cards are dealt what players. This has many uses, but is primarily necessary if our dealer will know how to play blackjack. This module will only talk with the single-card-dealer to minimize communication points and so that the single-card-dealer can trigger its flip process. Once the card-reader has determined what the present card is, it will pass a six-bit value to the single-card-dealer. The single-card-dealer can then flip the card and then pass the six-bit value back to the dealing-cart. The dealing cart can then pass this back to the control to signalize that the entire process has finished dealing to the appropriate position. Depending on the game being played or the card being dealt, the control can decide whether to keep or trash the card-value that was read.

The actual card reading computation will depend on if we implement barcode-reading using one sensor per player (2 total), or two sensors per player (4-total). The first option is to use real barcode printers/readers. This might be easiest if the commercial barcode readers can simply read off 1-52 depending on the card and pass that as a binary signal. The next option is to have two photo-reflective sensors that read two tracks of black marks. One track for clock cycle, the other track for actual information. Using one photo-reflective sensor either means placing the sensor inbetween tracks to read variable amounts of light and convert that to information, or to simply feedback card position from the dealing-belt and transform the time information to position information. This might make things more complicated not only in computation, but in removing some of the transparency between the card-reading layer and the card-dealing layer.