Smart Poker Table
Our “Smart Poker Table” detects the players’ cards as well as the community cards. It computes the winning probabilities for each player, according to the rules of Texas Hold’em, and renders them onto a screen.
Team members. Felix Starke, Tobias Robl, Pascal Meßner, and Timo Denk
Technical details. The software that reads the RFID readers is written in Node.js and C++. It makes API calls to a Java application that computes the probabilities. The UI itself is connected the Node.js backend through socket.io.
Music. Bazanji – Life I Chose, inspired by Daniel Negreanu.
Part List
- #4×2+5 RFID readers: RFID-RC522 13,56 MHz
- #52 RFID stickers: NFC Smart Tag Adhesives Sticker 1152 Bits (attached to the poker deck)
- Poker deck with 52 cards
- Wooden board with green coating
- Raspberry Pi (the version does not matter)
- CD74HC4067 16-channel multiplexer (for reading that many RFID readers with a single Raspberry Pi)
Nice job! I wonder if this is actually useful since as far as I know it’s not really the point to know the other players’ cards, right? So was this mainly a cool project that was fun to do, or is there some value to it for the game? Or potentially so that viewers of a game, if it was Livestreamed online or so, can see what’s going on?
Hey Leander, thanks for reaching out! Right now it was rather a “look, that’s cool use-case”. But potential ways of using it include what you’ve mentioned, i.e. (1) streaming it (with a short delay) to people who follow along. Besides that it would be an application to (2) record the game and watch it afterwards to improve your style of play.
is it for sale?
depends on how much you pay 😉
Please leave contact info
You can find my email address at the bottom of this page: https://timodenk.com/
I read this blog. It’s quite very brief and informative. I really loved it. Thanks for the post.
Hi
What frequency do RFID readers work on? How much money did you pay for hardware?
What is the price of this software ‘
Greetings Kizo
Hey Timo and team great work! Can you by any chance provide some electric circuit diagram or just give an example how you connect the readers with the multiplexer?
Hey George, unfortunately I do not have a circuit diagram. The idea was to solve the problem of being unable to control that many readers with a single Arduino. So we were multiplexing the serial connection between Arduino and readers such that the Arduino could select the reader it wanted to address through the multiplexer. I hope that helps a little bit.
Amazing work i stumbled across this trying to research DIY Smart poker tables. Is there any chance you have open source code at all. (understandable if not) thank you for your time.
Thank you so much, very kind. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to open-source it, as the work was carried out at SAP.
Thx anyway I was wondering if you had looked at multiplexing the antennas rather than the reader as in having 1 reader and “switching” to multiple antennas.
That’s actually an interesting idea and I believe we did not look into this option. Switching between the modules in their entirety seemed feasible so we just went with that option.
Hi Timo ,
I would like to know note about your invention
Hi Timo. Please tell me you are going to make this open source or sell the source so other can incorporate and improve. I am president of our poker club and would love to build this. I already have hardware in place but now looking for software or ideas. Thanks and keep up the good work.
BC
Hi Brenton, unfortunately I do not have access to the Arduino part of the source code anymore, I’m sorry. The code was written at my ex-ex-employer many years ago. I hope you can find a solution somehow anyway. Cheers!