1. Principles and practices

This week I attended the first lecture and got started on setting up both my home machine and work laptop with GIT and Mkdocs. I also made a rough sketch of the final project I have in mind. A machine that scans and catalogs trading cards in bulk.

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The Sketch

One of the main hobbies in my friend groups is the collectible trading card game “Magic: The Gathering”. During the course of playing the game you end up with a massive collection of cards. Easily numbering in the tens of thousands. There are apps and programs made to “scan” these cards to catalog them and keep track of what you own but they all have the limitation of having to manually scan or input the cards and their identifiers. I had the realization that if I wanted to scan my entire collection it would take me over a hundred hours at the pace I was going so I had the idea of making a machine that can scan the cards for me. The main idea being I can place a stack of cards on one end, They’d run through the machine and pop out the other. The main challenges here are going to be making sure the cards don’t get scratched or damaged and finding an adequate software solution. Indivudual cards can have multiple printings that can vary greatly in value depending on aesthetics and age. There are plenty of options but the Open Source options I find either don’t scan the individual printings or haven’t been maintained for years. There are proprietary options like Dragonshield’s MTG scanner and Delver Lens but most are limited to running on Android/iOS.