Automatic Poker Chip Sorter

Anyone who plays poker knows that sorting the poker chips after a game is tedious work. It is very boring to separate all the chips by their different colors. To try to tackle this time consuming task, I built a basic poker chip sorter. The machine sorts the poker chips into 3 different cups using a webcam. This project is made up of 4 sections; the conveyor belt, turntable, electronics, and computer vision. I chose not to make a full Instructable because this project was pretty simple.  All you need is some sort of conveyor to feed the chips and a turntable which moves to sort the chips.

The hardest part of this project was the vision software.  I used RoboRealm to distinguish between 3 different colors of poker chips, red white, or blue.  The webcam figures out what color the chip is and then tells the turntable to move depending on what chip is being sorted.  

Unfortunately I could not figure out how to program this sorter the way I initially wanted to.  Origninally I wanted the turntable to stay at the cup that was last dumped into.  I had to settle on the turntable returning back to the cup for the white chips after every chip is sorted, you can see this in the video.  This slows down the entire machine and makes it less efficient.  Also I wanted to design some sort of chip feeder for the conveyor belt, so you could dump a whole pile of chips into it and it would put them neatly on the conveyor belt.  I never got to this and just fed the conveyor belt by hand.

 For more information or the code I used to sort the poker chips email me at [e-mail]