Probs use Azure OCR with your webcam. Regardless of what you do, you'll be using the Scryfall API/database :)
This dude has a great demo/example - [https://github.com/Jack-Baumgartel/MTG-OCR-Imagehashing](https://github.com/Jack-Baumgartel/MTG-OCR-Imagehashing)
While this may be the most compatible? [https://github.com/wrealini/MTG-Card-Sorter](https://github.com/wrealini/MTG-Card-Sorter)
I back up this comment, Azure OCR is likely your best bet for a self made image recognition solution. It will take a little setup but will be a good learning opportunity and should work super well once done.
Apart from that if it's possible to get output from deliver lens that could work too, but I suspect you'll get closer to your desired setup with the flexibility of the Azure solution.
I'm working on a similar tesseract-based OCR system for my own card-sorting efforts. It's actually surprisingly easy to get going, *if* you're familiar with programming already.
You don't *have* to use the Scryfall API, though it is the obvious online feed choice. MTGJSON can provide portable data, but obviously you've gotta keep it up to date.
This is an interesting project. Keen to hear how it goes.
I'd be curious to see if this is one day commercialised and mass produced. I remember the Roca sorter being a thing, then never hearing about it again.
This is pretty neat indeed. Though I do remember there already being card sorting machines in the market. Not sure if this is the one I saw before, but here's one:
[https://tcgmachines.com/](https://tcgmachines.com/)
I do a quick google but couldn't find anything. What exactly is patentable about it? I did find like articles stating the technology is over 100 years old... [https://tcgmachines.com/blog/card-sorting-machines-a-technology-older-than-the-automobile](https://tcgmachines.com/blog/card-sorting-machines-a-technology-older-than-the-automobile)
Here are two patent sites. Go wild. The method, application, and design are things that can be patented.
https://patents.justia.com/patent/20220286571
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220286571A1/en
https://preview.redd.it/dasqps5pe8ic1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fad979959145a3fcca1a9d39dc74b745b892455
Here is the one with the patented design, let me know if you see a similarity.
Oh I've seen the 5 different card sorters of this type, I'm just wondering the specific patents. That link states they've been around as long as the automobile, so I'm surprised they still exist/aren't common domain.
There is one with this design. https://www.magic-sorter.com/
Design patents protect the design and look of the invention from being used for a certain number of years. Scanning a magic card, picking it up with vacuum suction, and programmatically sorting it into separate stave compartments has not been around since the late 1800s. Sorting machines have been around since then, but that does not protect design and application. Public domain applies to copyright, not patents. Patents are done after 14-20 years. If there is a new application for a technology, that process/design can be patented.
That's as good as saying a hinge on two different doors look alike. Regardless, it doesn't matter. I made this for me from the ground up with no reference material. Patients are irrelevant
Patents are relevant if you try to sell it or the design in any way. You said in earlier comments that you looked into these sorters so you at-least drew inspiration from it. You don’t just come up with an identical looking device with no reference material.
“No reference material”
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/s/o16ap9D4bR
You said that you looked at the product, were not satisfied with the price, and have decided to build one and sell kits to others. You are attempting to use their design to undercut them and profit while ignoring their design patent… and for that reason I’m out.
Sending the info the magic-sorter.
Go ahead, publicly available means the stl files will be available for everyone. Nowhere does it say in ANY comment (including the comment you referenced) that it will be available for sale. So you can take this idea that you came up with in your head and go away. I'm not breaking any laws.
And ya I looked at the machine price, said no.
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Appears they only have up to wild soft eldraine in their sorting database as well. That's an awfully expensive machine to be 3 releases behind. I hope they just haven't been updating their web blog.
Yeah another redditor purchased from these guys and apparently support has ceased to provide any help.
I would imagine there’s some hurdles with the software licensing and procurement of supplies for production.
People always think this stuff is super feasible until they get into the supply and production part and then they find out that sourcing **the exact same parts and products is a nightmare.**
Companies go out of business, they have restrictions about who they will sell to based on the use of their product, credit checks I could go on.
Most smaller businesses selling merchandise **will have 2-4 whole sale accounts** because often times one of your accounts will be out of stock on a product.
I have this machine and use it often. Their customer service portal has been useful and generally replies within 1 work day, even checking back in after a bit of if I didn’t respond back. Their company also made a lot of the parts to be able to be 3d printed and you can get their model files to do it yourself. Other parts are easy to purchase on Amazon and customer support has given me direct links to Amazon for small sensors and stuff that have broken from normal wear and tear.
Not exactly, I did originally look at this but did not want to spend the money on it. this cost a third to a half of that and I plan this to be publicly available for people to build their own
Strongly recommend you look into how the other machines were put together. They all started saying basically the same thing you are. Not damaging the cards at high speeds is the challenge. The tech to recognize the cards is already there
The STL files of the Magic Sorter are available on GitHub though? [https://github.com/MagicSorter/magic-sorter-files](https://github.com/magicsorter/magic-sorter-files)
Beyond any purchase/lease price, all those sorting machines have subscriptions you have to pay too >.>. There's [CardBot](https://cardcastle.co/cardbot-players), [PhyzBatch-9000](https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000), and the one you can rent from TCGPlayer - the [Roca](https://www.rocarobotics.com/).
You could ask at your local LGS, they usually have a scanner for people who have trade-ins, to run them through TCG or whatever their choice is.
Not saying those are open source, but you could set it up as a peripheral where the separate scanner is "scanning" the output of your already-established setup?
This is dope as hell, if you get it working and wanna test it, me and my 25,000 cards of unsorted shenanigans are happy to help 🤣
I'm actually currently expanding this by 5 more trays. Right now it uses tray 0 as home, it will use 1 through 30 for sorting anything, 31 for art cards, 32 for promos, 33 for tokens, and 34 for overflow. Once any tray reaches 400 card that tray is no longer available. And once the overflow reaches 400 the machine stops. I don't have an official time for card but I would estimate probably close to 5 seconds
Hey I’ve got code that is pretty much finished for this exact project, I just lost interest when i started doing the hardware aspect. If you want to chat and maybe join forces, send me a dm.
It’s Python code with all the hard parts pretty much finished.
Scryfall allows you to download a multi-GB cache of card data that you can use to access card pages after matching a card. I recommend using that as the basis for comparison.
From there, you can scan an image with OCR for matches with each card image. That will then give you the address for further card data from scryfall. Alternatively, you can OCR the text in an image and fuzzy-search the scryfall data in text format to find potential matches (which will greatly reduce the filesize of your lookup db).
OCR means that you don't need to compare with every single unique piece of artwork or printing of a card. The text allows you to quickly find the card, from which you can then narrow down the printing (especially if you have skimmed the set code and collector number). Then you might have to distinguish between variants.
OCR cuts your search space down by a *huge* amount. With over 100k unique items to differentiate in EN alone, a little bit of text can narrow it to a few dozen items. So OCR is likely to be the best computer vision solution. The only better options I can think of would be if there's already a card identifying service or library that you can submit queries to. Using external queries loses the option of running the sort offline and periodically updating the local card database.
After narrowing down to a specific card or group of printings, you can use other parts of a computer vision library to compare the print to known images.
I see that the majority of the designs use a 3-axis freedom head vacuum limb. How it is compared to the design that uses a roller to push the card from the stack and a rotation mechanism to deliver it to a specific track?
[https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000](https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000)
This ones the gold standard, sorting speeds are incredible but its very expensive.
Yes this machine is very good and my machine will never be as fast as it given the design. My design was based on the most sorting area per dollar not really for speed. I will work on speed after I get a feeding mechanism and image recognition added to it.
oh i didnt mean to knock yours! i had a lot of fun with a similar project a long time ago.
I was using a feeder similar to the phyzbatch gate to extract one card at a time and gecko tape to pick it up instead of a vacuum. To identify the card i used Delverlens on my phone connected to my raspberry pi via usb and controlled it with ADB.
This guy was making one - hasn't posted anything about it in about a year though so not sure if he ever finished it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3_t0O5JumA
More stacks in a smaller area, After incorporating card recognition and a feeder the machine would be able to hold a maximum of 14,000, maybe 15,000 cards tops
if u wanna go open source I recommend easyocr it’s far better than tesseract. Another good choice is open mml ocr models, If ur really good at what u do you can always play around with donut as well. Non ocr approach to ocr. It’s very cool and I don’t quite understand how the fuck it works
Python developer here. I am currently working on a project that does what you are looking for. However, I am using the Django framework, so some of it would have to be transcribed to meet your needs. What questions do you have?
Also, as others have said, if you plan to sell this, there is currently a product on the market with patents on the method you are trying to implement.
I've tried many of the image recognition software that I found on Reddit but I couldn't get any of them to work. Everything had an error of some kind, don't know if they're too outdated or I just didn't do it right
As for the patents, magic-sorter.com does have this concept but I designed this thing from the ground up using none of their ideas. Realistically there's only a few ways to design such a machine. Three axis, roller, or rotational, which all 3 are already made. We just happened to both design a 3-axis robot with suction cups, which itself can't actually be patented as it is a basic robotic concept, plus there are many differences between our two designs. Regardless, I do not plan on selling this.
I just need to find some sort of software or create some sort of software to which it can pipe the set code into a variable in another python code
Store owner here - would love to buy one of these from someone other than the predatory big 3 machines right now..
Feel free to contact me if you end up selling it!
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Probs use Azure OCR with your webcam. Regardless of what you do, you'll be using the Scryfall API/database :) This dude has a great demo/example - [https://github.com/Jack-Baumgartel/MTG-OCR-Imagehashing](https://github.com/Jack-Baumgartel/MTG-OCR-Imagehashing) While this may be the most compatible? [https://github.com/wrealini/MTG-Card-Sorter](https://github.com/wrealini/MTG-Card-Sorter)
I back up this comment, Azure OCR is likely your best bet for a self made image recognition solution. It will take a little setup but will be a good learning opportunity and should work super well once done. Apart from that if it's possible to get output from deliver lens that could work too, but I suspect you'll get closer to your desired setup with the flexibility of the Azure solution.
I'm working on a similar tesseract-based OCR system for my own card-sorting efforts. It's actually surprisingly easy to get going, *if* you're familiar with programming already. You don't *have* to use the Scryfall API, though it is the obvious online feed choice. MTGJSON can provide portable data, but obviously you've gotta keep it up to date.
You can download the Scryfall API data as well so it's portable also.
Looks like a Saw trap.
I want to sort a game.
r/dontputyourdickinthat
The real saw trap would be “sort these cards *by hand*”
I wonder if partnering with the folks at ManaBox or one of the other scanner apps might be fruitful.
I reached out to ManaBox a year ago with a POC, they aren’t interested.
This is an interesting project. Keen to hear how it goes. I'd be curious to see if this is one day commercialised and mass produced. I remember the Roca sorter being a thing, then never hearing about it again.
This is pretty neat indeed. Though I do remember there already being card sorting machines in the market. Not sure if this is the one I saw before, but here's one: [https://tcgmachines.com/](https://tcgmachines.com/)
This is a clone of an already commercial product. [https://www.magic-sorter.com/](https://www.magic-sorter.com/)
And they have patents.
I do a quick google but couldn't find anything. What exactly is patentable about it? I did find like articles stating the technology is over 100 years old... [https://tcgmachines.com/blog/card-sorting-machines-a-technology-older-than-the-automobile](https://tcgmachines.com/blog/card-sorting-machines-a-technology-older-than-the-automobile)
Here are two patent sites. Go wild. The method, application, and design are things that can be patented. https://patents.justia.com/patent/20220286571 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220286571A1/en
https://preview.redd.it/dasqps5pe8ic1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fad979959145a3fcca1a9d39dc74b745b892455 Here is the one with the patented design, let me know if you see a similarity.
Oh I've seen the 5 different card sorters of this type, I'm just wondering the specific patents. That link states they've been around as long as the automobile, so I'm surprised they still exist/aren't common domain.
There is one with this design. https://www.magic-sorter.com/ Design patents protect the design and look of the invention from being used for a certain number of years. Scanning a magic card, picking it up with vacuum suction, and programmatically sorting it into separate stave compartments has not been around since the late 1800s. Sorting machines have been around since then, but that does not protect design and application. Public domain applies to copyright, not patents. Patents are done after 14-20 years. If there is a new application for a technology, that process/design can be patented.
That's as good as saying a hinge on two different doors look alike. Regardless, it doesn't matter. I made this for me from the ground up with no reference material. Patients are irrelevant
Patents are relevant if you try to sell it or the design in any way. You said in earlier comments that you looked into these sorters so you at-least drew inspiration from it. You don’t just come up with an identical looking device with no reference material.
“No reference material” https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/s/o16ap9D4bR You said that you looked at the product, were not satisfied with the price, and have decided to build one and sell kits to others. You are attempting to use their design to undercut them and profit while ignoring their design patent… and for that reason I’m out. Sending the info the magic-sorter.
Go ahead, publicly available means the stl files will be available for everyone. Nowhere does it say in ANY comment (including the comment you referenced) that it will be available for sale. So you can take this idea that you came up with in your head and go away. I'm not breaking any laws. And ya I looked at the machine price, said no.
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Patents don't stop anyone from building their own version of a thing. Just means he can't sell it or run a business from it.
**[Little late to the Party OP I’m sorry.](https://www.magic-sorter.com)**
Appears they only have up to wild soft eldraine in their sorting database as well. That's an awfully expensive machine to be 3 releases behind. I hope they just haven't been updating their web blog.
I have one of these and the database is up through MKM and even has the not-yet-released Clue cards in it. I just turned it on to check.
Yeah another redditor purchased from these guys and apparently support has ceased to provide any help. I would imagine there’s some hurdles with the software licensing and procurement of supplies for production. People always think this stuff is super feasible until they get into the supply and production part and then they find out that sourcing **the exact same parts and products is a nightmare.** Companies go out of business, they have restrictions about who they will sell to based on the use of their product, credit checks I could go on. Most smaller businesses selling merchandise **will have 2-4 whole sale accounts** because often times one of your accounts will be out of stock on a product.
I have this machine and use it often. Their customer service portal has been useful and generally replies within 1 work day, even checking back in after a bit of if I didn’t respond back. Their company also made a lot of the parts to be able to be 3d printed and you can get their model files to do it yourself. Other parts are easy to purchase on Amazon and customer support has given me direct links to Amazon for small sensors and stuff that have broken from normal wear and tear.
[https://i.imgur.com/yOJyKme.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/yOJyKme.jpeg) You *wish*!
> More than 12,000 unique cards. They aren't wrong but 27,000 is a smidge more than 12,000
Not exactly, I did originally look at this but did not want to spend the money on it. this cost a third to a half of that and I plan this to be publicly available for people to build their own
Strongly recommend you look into how the other machines were put together. They all started saying basically the same thing you are. Not damaging the cards at high speeds is the challenge. The tech to recognize the cards is already there
This^ If I still have to sort through bulk purchases to pick out the $$$ cards then the machine is not going to save me money or time.
The STL files of the Magic Sorter are available on GitHub though? [https://github.com/MagicSorter/magic-sorter-files](https://github.com/magicsorter/magic-sorter-files)
That looks expensive!
Beyond any purchase/lease price, all those sorting machines have subscriptions you have to pay too >.>. There's [CardBot](https://cardcastle.co/cardbot-players), [PhyzBatch-9000](https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000), and the one you can rent from TCGPlayer - the [Roca](https://www.rocarobotics.com/).
You could ask at your local LGS, they usually have a scanner for people who have trade-ins, to run them through TCG or whatever their choice is. Not saying those are open source, but you could set it up as a peripheral where the separate scanner is "scanning" the output of your already-established setup? This is dope as hell, if you get it working and wanna test it, me and my 25,000 cards of unsorted shenanigans are happy to help 🤣
Do you have a feeding mechanism set up as well? How fast can it process?
Asking the real questions.
I'm actually currently expanding this by 5 more trays. Right now it uses tray 0 as home, it will use 1 through 30 for sorting anything, 31 for art cards, 32 for promos, 33 for tokens, and 34 for overflow. Once any tray reaches 400 card that tray is no longer available. And once the overflow reaches 400 the machine stops. I don't have an official time for card but I would estimate probably close to 5 seconds
Hey I’ve got code that is pretty much finished for this exact project, I just lost interest when i started doing the hardware aspect. If you want to chat and maybe join forces, send me a dm. It’s Python code with all the hard parts pretty much finished.
Scryfall allows you to download a multi-GB cache of card data that you can use to access card pages after matching a card. I recommend using that as the basis for comparison. From there, you can scan an image with OCR for matches with each card image. That will then give you the address for further card data from scryfall. Alternatively, you can OCR the text in an image and fuzzy-search the scryfall data in text format to find potential matches (which will greatly reduce the filesize of your lookup db).
Do you think OCR is the best method? If so, why?
OCR means that you don't need to compare with every single unique piece of artwork or printing of a card. The text allows you to quickly find the card, from which you can then narrow down the printing (especially if you have skimmed the set code and collector number). Then you might have to distinguish between variants. OCR cuts your search space down by a *huge* amount. With over 100k unique items to differentiate in EN alone, a little bit of text can narrow it to a few dozen items. So OCR is likely to be the best computer vision solution. The only better options I can think of would be if there's already a card identifying service or library that you can submit queries to. Using external queries loses the option of running the sort offline and periodically updating the local card database. After narrowing down to a specific card or group of printings, you can use other parts of a computer vision library to compare the print to known images.
I see that the majority of the designs use a 3-axis freedom head vacuum limb. How it is compared to the design that uses a roller to push the card from the stack and a rotation mechanism to deliver it to a specific track?
[https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000](https://tcgmachines.com/shop/phyzbatch-9000) This ones the gold standard, sorting speeds are incredible but its very expensive.
Yes this machine is very good and my machine will never be as fast as it given the design. My design was based on the most sorting area per dollar not really for speed. I will work on speed after I get a feeding mechanism and image recognition added to it.
oh i didnt mean to knock yours! i had a lot of fun with a similar project a long time ago. I was using a feeder similar to the phyzbatch gate to extract one card at a time and gecko tape to pick it up instead of a vacuum. To identify the card i used Delverlens on my phone connected to my raspberry pi via usb and controlled it with ADB.
Oh not at all, I know it will never be as fast as that thing though that thing is a beast 😆
This guy was making one - hasn't posted anything about it in about a year though so not sure if he ever finished it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3_t0O5JumA
More stacks in a smaller area, After incorporating card recognition and a feeder the machine would be able to hold a maximum of 14,000, maybe 15,000 cards tops
if u wanna go open source I recommend easyocr it’s far better than tesseract. Another good choice is open mml ocr models, If ur really good at what u do you can always play around with donut as well. Non ocr approach to ocr. It’s very cool and I don’t quite understand how the fuck it works
Python developer here. I am currently working on a project that does what you are looking for. However, I am using the Django framework, so some of it would have to be transcribed to meet your needs. What questions do you have? Also, as others have said, if you plan to sell this, there is currently a product on the market with patents on the method you are trying to implement.
I've tried many of the image recognition software that I found on Reddit but I couldn't get any of them to work. Everything had an error of some kind, don't know if they're too outdated or I just didn't do it right As for the patents, magic-sorter.com does have this concept but I designed this thing from the ground up using none of their ideas. Realistically there's only a few ways to design such a machine. Three axis, roller, or rotational, which all 3 are already made. We just happened to both design a 3-axis robot with suction cups, which itself can't actually be patented as it is a basic robotic concept, plus there are many differences between our two designs. Regardless, I do not plan on selling this. I just need to find some sort of software or create some sort of software to which it can pipe the set code into a variable in another python code
Do you know what type of errors were given. You have to make sure the Python version and dependency versions jive with the code.
I'll have to go back and try them again because Ive tried too many different ones and would not be able to currently give you an accurate answer
I like the trash strewn about the floor. 10/10 🤩
You'll live, it's a work area. My son probably dropped it and is not relevant
Store owner here - would love to buy one of these from someone other than the predatory big 3 machines right now.. Feel free to contact me if you end up selling it!
I think there would be a cease and desist letter from magic sorter if this was sold.
Out of curiosity how much does the components used to build cost? If that is ok to share 🙂
less than 200$, less than 100$ if you can find an old 3d printer for free.
Awesome man hope your project takes off! 💪
I've probably got $250 in materials in it
I want one. But I would think it stole from me.
Are you the guy that posted about this on you tube awhile back?
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Ok. There's a dude on you tube that was making one he hasn't uploaded in awhile tho https://youtu.be/sy7dtW8CvQ4?si=4ReFQsNESWNySXnH
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Good luck op thst Would br cool !