Software Scoping the MTG Sorter 

While this sounds very very cool, I’m a bit worried about feature creep. If the software launches with just a few of these then that’s totally great. If these are all planned launch features then it will be harder to get this off the ground

Excited to hear about more progress! Thanks for keeping us updated on this amazing project! :)

Re: foil detection. In the bottom left, next to the set code, there’s an indicator icon for whether a card is foil. Not sure if this detail would help in detection. All foils have a star icon. All non foils have a dot instead.

Even if you only are able to deliver on half of these, I'm incredibly excited. Even a simple machine capable of putting alphabet stuff into two piles would suffice for me. While I know it's a far ways off, I'm definitely getting in on a build once you have anything available!

You could potentially use use a light sensor to measure the amount of reflected light from a normal card vs a foil card. Shining an LED on to the card and having the senor measure the amount of light, with a threshold cutoff. This could give a potential rating if a card if foil or not.

Very interesting project! Thank you for keeping us informed and happy coding!

Exciting series and project. Thanks for the clarity

love the updates and the work, best of luck going forward!

Definitely excited to see how this project comes along and agree with the priority list of features 👍

Haven't watch it yet, but already excited! Been waiting to see more! I just got back into casually coding stuff, and have been coding an MTG project.

Since you got the photos anyway I suggest extensive journaling from the start meaning: "DEBUG" Should include the image of the card including everything the system managed to read from it. This will not just help in development but also be really handy when it comes to processing the error pile. Maybe a card just failed because some insect decided to sit the in just the right moment. Or someone opened the window and the wind blew some debris... In those examples the end user will see: Oh, not the fault of the machine or the card, just bad luck. Or position the machine somewhere where the cat does not want to play with it.

Looks good so far, although the only edge case i can think of that you didn't explicitly mention is repacking for drafts, cubes, or even jumpstart specifically. Looking forward to the next~

I can't wait to see more, very interested !

This is awesome project that you are doing. I have thought about doing this as well because I have about 15k bulk in Pokemon cards I am currently sorting manually. Just subscribed. Looking forward to the finished product.

Looking forward to being able to get one

I'm going to make a video of my card sorter now, you've inspired me

You're doing great. Keep it up

Hey there, lovely video and spiffy sweater. Note concerning the custom sorting criteria: It would be nice to be able to combine or override criteria. ie slots 1-X sort by card type, but slot X+1 will receive any cards with a value of >$3. Also card color vs color identity would be nice for cards with colored activated abilities. The most ideal version (in my eyes) would be being able to assign Scryfall-esque criteria to each bin and giving bins priority over others. You may have already considered or mentioned the features, so I don't pretend to be having novel ideas. Additionally, I have no real experience with software design, and I presume it's not as easy as "make it do Scryfall" 😂 Super excited to see how it turns out!

What about the ability to remember the order of cards, so that you could re-feed a sorted stack to sub-sort it faster? My proposed use case is sorting a stack by color, then re-feeding a specific color stack into the machine to sort by rarity. If the sorting machine can remember (or receive input on) the order of the cards in each stack, it can sub-sort without re-scanning each card, which should be faster, I think. If this is going to be used in retail spaces, increased speed becomes more valuable.

Keep the great work!

Great video bro 😊

Love this project! Keep up the good work!!

good luck!

i am constantly checking for updates on this project, love it so much and really hope that it will be open source or will at least have the project files for sale.

Really exciting work! Since the card recognition alone would be really useful, I wonder if it could be built in a modular/service manner. Where it doesn’t necessarily need to be used with the sorter. Where the recognition portion could be used independently if desired? I have a personal project that would be a life saver on

I am not a programmer but I'll take a guess at how to tackle the Mystery Booster/The List issue with an analogous feature in a speedrunning program called LiveSplit - it matches frames from a given video to determine when to start and stop a timer. If there was a way to scan the entire card image, and then, once the image has been rotated or corrected/normalized, detect for black (non-List card) or non-black (List card) on just that tiny portion of it, hopefully that wouldn't add too much processing time. Maybe there could be a library of List cards that the program cross-references, checks the card name against, and skips this step entirely if a given card isn't on the List? As for foils, if there is a light shining directly on each card, a foil card will reflect much more light than a non-foil, then maybe a check for the luminance of the resulting scan might be possible? I figure image processing is a lot harder than I imagine it to be though, so no idea if this has already been done by the larger companies working on the same problem. I personally wouldn't mind a "manual review" pile option but that obviously doesn't scale. It sounds complicated but having multiple thresholds of confidence for 'speed' sorting vs 'accurate' sorting (where the 'speed' setting skips the steps for checking set, condition, foil, language and List, etc) might be another option? Sorry for the long comment haha, I just spend a lot of time sorting and I like brainstorming about how to make it more efficient :)

Without international support OCR alone should get very good results. Offline OCR has REALLY good results nowadays with "artificial text". I used "tesseract". Export to real open standards like CSV or JSON should be trivial. About every language has JSON libs by now. However I suggest something with at least some typing.* To avoid surprises in data structure. Like 1/0 randomly switching with true false and "true" "false".)* Bogus proprietary formats like MsOffice however are still Voodoo. Yeah, you can dance and pray to the swamp god. But the results may vary don't expect something close to reliable. What do you expect under "more"? *Javascript or PHP are example outliers here. Mostly to ensure the output will match the format the existing inventory system expects. Without that compatibility requirement, whatever PHP for example would produce would be consistent enough.

Such a coincidence that we both started building card sorting robots at the same time. My goals are very similar to yours, but I'm going a gantry style system with suction, the extract opposite hahah. I think maybe if we work together on the vision we can get better results because that code is reusable. I'm planning for my design to be completely open source so you're welcome to use my vision code if you'd like to try it

I am a but sadden by how low the priority for non English cards is, as a European they are very present here. But I also understand the challenges, it could make any OCR solution way more difficult. It seems a solution used by other programs is to focus on the illustration instead, but that's probably harder than text. Anyways I am happy to see the focus you put on project management and scoping, often an under rated part of a project

Will the functionality be able to include tokens? I have a 4 row box of tokens that desperately need sorted.... Love the project so far!! Really looking forward to more news

Surprised Error Handling and Confidence is 4th on that list, and not second. Having export and sorting options is also a must, don't me wrong, but if the output is unreliable (incorrect cards, low confidence) it’ll be unusable, as you’ll have to manually go through and verify the results anyway to be sure, defeating the purpose. Really feels that 4 and 2 should be swapped.

One of the sorting mechanisms could be number piles or alphabetized....this would be great for collectors to put cards in order.

Do you plan on making this project open source, so that we can follow along, or possibly attempt to build our own machines based on the plans you have. Does this have a github page we can follow?

Would this work for other TCGs or only MTG?