Goals

• the machine can inventory all of my cards
• the machine can sort all of my cards into two stacks (eg. it can't shuffle cards at all, but it can, given the list of cards in a specific deck, and given the stack of all cards you own, extract the specific deck you're looking for)

Design

• Be able to take off ONE card from the large pile, and put it in the "hot seat"
• (maybe) Recognize whether the hotseat card is upside-down or not
• (maybe) Be able to rotate upside-down cards so they're right-side up
• Be able to VERY CLEARLY take a picture of the ID on the hotset card (eg. with the camera zoomed in properly, and have a bright light on the card)
• When the card is moved to the output slot, there needs to be a mechanism to make the card go to the specific one of two slots.

The cards need to be in the right orientation so the camera can be set up to image a close-up of just the end of the card.

For WoWTCG cards... ALL of them have a white section on the bottom. So that's the easiest way to check (especially if the camera can both image a wide-angle shot, and the close-up of the "bottom"). If both the top and bottom can't be imaged and compared, then presumably, the computer would just try to decode one side, and if it failed, then flip it, and try to decode that other side.

Alternately, we could just do some sort of cartesian-distance thing on a picture of the whole-card view, and try to find the closest match. Presumably that would work well also, and wouldn't require the card-turning hardware.