Thread:Kota1908/@comment-26290163-20160210122940/@comment-4764137-20160219064549

Ah, well. The reason I figured that the size would be closer to that would be that you have to allow enough room for the two halves of the deck to completely separate. Design and such is a favorite topic of mine, so I could go on for days about something like this... The issue I see is getting cards to come away with the separators. Which leads me to an idea, actually... You want to reduce the size and make things easier on the separators, I think I know a way.

Don't pull the cards apart, let them fall apart. The way I see it, the easiest way to reduce the size is for the separators to be hinged, that is, like a door. Except up and down, rather than forward and back. As the separators come down away from the cards in the deck, they push something else up in the exact center, causing the cards to fall roughly evenly in both directions. They clump naturally, and then the two pieces "switch" positions, coming back together, and voila, they've been shuffled once. It's not exactly a riffle shuffle, but it's close....

It also prevents you from being able to really stack seeing as you have no way of knowing which cards will fall which direction. I recommend a minimum of 5-7 shuffles before a game and a minimum of 3 during a game in that manner.

It also solves the issue of card size and deck size differentiation. If the device can hold 100 sleeved cards, it shouldn't need any more. Then it just needs to spring-load so that the separators (which I believe should also be what hold the cards together) snap to the size of the deck, and bam. Just make the separator prongs shaped liked rounded triangles that take up maybe half of the height of a card (preferably in the middle of it) and maybe a little under half the width, and it's probably mostly fine. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it does seem like it'd be functional. Oh, and use a springloaded back to push the deck up/forward so that the top card is always in the same place, and have the back lock in place when the shuffle function happens so that it doesn't try to push into the deck spot while the deck is out of place... And then the ability to draw with a button is just a matter of kicking the top card up. The ability to eject the deck is a matter of kicking up the separator casing without opening it so that the top of the deck is seen (and removable), but the separator casing isn't seen itself.

Quite an ingenious design, if I do say so myself. Although it'd probably work better if the separator pieces are really thin, so I guess the question is "how thin can you print your plastic?". Also, try to make each separator tooth about 2 or 3 sleeved cards-width apart. That is important. Really, I feel like each individual thing I've mentioned (even the spring-loaded back to push the deck into place) is important to achieving the overall goal here. Although you may have to push the springloaded back backwards a touch when the separators swap places.