Now that it is summer I have a lot of time on my hands. I started looking into the logistics of building a Lego card shuffler. There are many YouTube videos of Lego card shufflers. They are all quite similar in their construction except the robotic card dealer.

I started to build a single roller for one side. Most of the videos I watched said that the hardest thing was to ensure one card came out at a time, and it was. I used rubber bands to force the cards into the rollers, but for future innovation such as multiple unaided shuffles that will have to change. I wanted to limit the whole thing to one motor. It would have been much easier with a motor on each side, but I have limited resources.

To use one motor, I had to connect both sides together. I tried to use gears, but it was to far a distance to cover with plastic gears and they started to skip. I ended up using a piston like those used on trains to transfer the motors power. I got the idea from this video.

“Real” card shufflers don’t require you to take the cards out. This is the most obvious way to improve this design. To further improve, there would also have to be some minor programming for timing. I think that the hardest part would be splitting the deck. Using a lowering and raising deck like automatic card shufflers do seems like the easiest way to solve this.

Another thing about this design it that it doesn’t shuffle the cards super accurately. I put the cards in, half upside down, half face up.

The cards came out like this. They tend to get stuck together because they come out and stack vertically.