As a part of my coursework abroad I enrolled in a class titled Design for Manufacturability (DFM), and at the core of this class is a semester long group design project. The constraints were simple, but effective for highlighting the content of the course in context.

Our product had to:

• Have at least 2 moving parts

• Solve a sufficiently novel problem

• Cost less than $30 to prototype

Our team settled on making an automatic card shuffling device that uses entirely mechanical action to operate the device. Furthermore, the aspect which makes it most novel is that the device shuffles cards in a way similar to how a human would shuffle cards by hand, and thus reduces some of the patterns that arise from shuffling devices which are too predicable.

After many prototypes, design changes and endless tests, we finally settled on our final prototype which would theoretically be our final step before pursuing mass manufacturing.