As students in engineering, we wanted to make a useful project and that we are interested in. To make it, we had to use an Arduino MEGA.

My team likes to play cards together. Our best card game is the “belot”. In most cases, four players are necessary to play. The players are divided in teams of two and are seated opposite each other. One of the two teams, who takes the trump, undertakes to do more points than the other. So the scoring is an important part of the game.

Remember that each card rank has a specific scoring value and changes if it’s the trump or not. It is also possible to score with declarations. Declarations are particular sets of cards held in players’ hands, which give players extra points if announced!

There are three sorts of declarations:

• 4 cards of the same rank, called “square”.

• Sequences from 3 to 8 cards of the same suit.

• “Belot” is King and Queen of any trump suit held together in one player’s hand.

There are a lot of situations that make the calculation difficult. That is why we decided to develop a scoring system for the belot. The system will look like a little box with many push buttons according to declarations and each card rank. There will be also a screen to display the score.

We are going to help you to rebuild this project for your own use.

Step 1: How Does It Work

The functioning of this system is quite simple. It follows the different sequences of a classical belote game. Let’s see the global steps!

After the distribution of the first five cards, the first step is to determinate who takes the trump and which colour it is. The system asks these two questions. You have to answer with the different associated buttons.

Now you can distribute the last three cards. By default, it’s the team one who begins. For each played card, first you have to encode the colour and then the value.

The system identifies which card is the stronger and which team wins the hand. This sequence is repeated eight times. Between each hand, the system displays the score.

At the hand of a part, the system knows who wins the “dix de der”, if there is a “capot” (if a team wins all the hands) and asks if there are some declarations. If so, the team has to encode the points associated. There are only buttons “20 points” and “50 points”. So, if a team has a “100” for instance, the players have to encode two times “50 points”. It allows to minimize the number of buttons. If the team who takes the trump doesn’t win at least the half of the points, the other team wins all points of the part.

The game continues until a team reaches 1001 points.

Step 2: Model

Material

-1 Arduino Mega 2560

-1 module LCD Arduino 16x2

- 56 Arduino wires 20cm

- 9 push buttons (red)

- 9 push buttons (black)

- 1 resistor 220

- 1 potentiometer 2 K

- 1 breadboard

- 1m2 wood board

- 10 screws

Toolbox :

- Screwdriver

- Soldering gun and tin

- Drill

- Painting (if you want)

Model :

1. To make a box with the wood board. The volume of this box is more or less 30 cm3.

2. To weld the wires to the 18 buttons.

3. To drill 18 holes and to put the buttons.

4. To drill one hole to put the LCD.

5. To weld the wires on the LCD

6. To connect the different wires

Electrical connection :

Buttons | Digital Input Arduino | Breadboard

Team 1 | 22 | Grd

Team 2 | 23 | Grd

Heart (color) | 24 | Grd

Club (color) | 25 | Grd

Diamond (color) | 26 | Grd

Spade (color) | 27 | Grd

7 (card) | 28 | Grd

8 (card) | 29 | Grd

9 (card) | 30 | Grd

10 (card) | 31 | Grd

Jack (card) | 32 | Grd

Queen (card) | 33 | Grd

King (card) | 34 | Grd

Ace (card) | 35 | Grd

Yes button | 36 | Grd

No button | 37 | Grd

20 declaration | 38 | Grd

50 declaration | 39 | Grd

The best way to connect the LCD is to follow the instruction on this link.

Step 3: Software

The Arduino language is based on a C++ language developed for Arduino. To use the Arduino code of the project, the first step is to install the Arduino Software. It can be downloaded for Windows, Linux or Mac from the Arduino official website. The installation of this program is very easy.

Our software is a quite long program. The difficult for this project is to take in account all the possible situations of a belote game. It follows the different sequences of a belote game, described in the step before.

Of course, different improvements can be provided. We hope that you will find some of these ?.

Our program is available on this files :