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Dice analyzer machine project

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mouser:
So here is another article on someone who build a dice fairness machine:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/12/01/1715253/experimental-study-of-29-polyhedral-dice-using-rolling-machine-opencv-analysis

And here's a video of their device:


Basically its an arduino controlling a cup that shakes up a die and then a camera that senses what the die rolled, and it is used to test whether a die has equal probability of landing on each face.  [results show that physical dice are always somewhat off from fair].


I *love* this idea as a piece of modern artwork.. I'd love to have something small and beautiful, a standalone little thing that i could put on little coffee table (i'm thinking like an old ticker tape stock market machine), where you could just drop in any die, and have it do some automated testing for several hours and report out the statistics of a die.

I'd be willing to collaborate on writing the software if someone would do the hardware..  Raspberry pi, arduino, whatever.

Key is it has to be BEAUTIFUL and SMALL -- i'm interested in this as a piece of art.  Something like:




Other web pages that have done this kind of thing:
http://www.markfickett.com/stuff/artPage.php?id=389
http://timothyweber.org/dieroller
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2011/10/testing-balanced-dice-power.html

mouser:
So, as a lark I have been working on software for this, using Python and OpenCv:
Dice analyzer machine project

It's not nearly as simple as it may seem, but lots of interesting machine vision issues to deal with.. I've learned more about the Stroke Width Transform and binary thresholding than I ever though possible.

The heart of the problem is getting something fully automatic and reliable, that does not need any human tuning based on the color of dice, etc., and dealing with different kinds of dice (pips, numbers, custom art).

Sometimes the difference between a 6 and a 9 is a tiny little dot present at the baseline.. otherwise known in machine vision as "noise"...


I have not spent much time thinking about the hardware.. that will come after..  I'm thinking Raspberry Pi with a nice touchscreen.
The two challenges with regard to the hardware are how to create a dice jumbler that can sufficiently randomize a die while looking like a nice piece of art, and the second is creating a sufficiently predictable background for the die (that is, ideally i'd like a die pretty well centered on a plain colored background with no shadows). 

One can consider two kinds of basic designs: Camera looking down vs camera from underneath.  Both have their own sets of difficulties, both in terms of hardware implementation and in terms of software vision processing.

p3lb0x:
If anyone comes up  with a good idea for hardware and is willing to put down some money (I'd of course spend some myself), I could probably try building it.

mouser:
Progress on code to extract and isolate the upright die face image:

Deozaan:
I'm just commenting to say that I find this project interesting. Keep us updated. :Thmbsup:

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