Published: Sep 28, 2020
Country - Sweden
Country
Sweden
Team - 4 Experts
Team
4 Experts
Industry - Sports
Industry
Sports
Time - 12 Months
Time
12 Months

Overview

A company from Sweden manufactures equipment for club and tournament bridge events. The business produces and sells card dealing machines, sorting devices, boards, tables, cards and bidding boxes for bridge.

One of the popular variations of club bridge plays is duplicate bridge. Each table and each team plays the same arrangement of the 52 playing cards (a bridge deal). All the teams compete by playing identical deals, eliminating the element of luck this way, and are scored depending on their performance.

Dealing and sorting machines are intended to automate the card dealing process, speed up the bridge deals duplication process and eliminate errors. First efforts to automate the card dealing process were made almost forty years ago. Since then, card dealing equipment has developed along with technological progress. The expansion of mobile devices creates new calls for manufactures of club and tournament bridge equipment, as a new era required mobile-compatible card dealing machines.

We've become an IT partner to develop embedded software for card dealing devices and modernize windows-based software up to mobile-compatible.

Assigned experts

  • 3 software developers
  • 1 QA engineer
  • 1 BA

Timespan

  • 8 months of implementation
  • maintenance and support

Industry field

  • Mind Sports/Card Games
  • Duplicate Bridge

Solution

Developing software for card dealing equipment that conforms to the many technical requirements and bridge rules is a challenging task. The delivered embedded system runs on a device using Raspberry Pi, which means severe hardware performance restrictions.

We've implemented a multi-threaded web service to connect a server-side and a client. In our solution, not only a client sends requests to a server-side, but a server-side can also request a client. A mobile-compatible web interface visualizes card arrangements and allows an operator to set, configure and manage a deal via a Wi-Fi connection.

As a complementary functionality, the software offers an analysis of deals, scoring and game results presentation.

Embedded Software Development for Card Dealing Equipment. Case Study

Technology Stack

Angular
JavaScript
Node.js
WebSocket
Raspberry Pi

Achievements

Duplication of card deals for tournament bridge is a time-consuming process when it is manual. Besides, it causes more mistakes during manual card dealing, and competition can be unfair.

Dealing machines powered by our embedded system can automate the card dealing process, increase its speed, and reduce errors.

Depending on an equipment model and an operator's proficiency, one card dealing machine can arrange 32 boards for duplicate bridge in 3.5 minutes. Moreover, with mobile-compatible software, an operator can use one mobile device to operate several dealing machines.

The delivered solution allowed our customers to package their sophisticated card dealing equipment with modern mobile-compatible software, increasing its value for the end-users and bringing modern technologies to the otherwise conservative market.

Growth</br>

Growth

Bridge tournaments and club events can organize more tournaments and club events by simplifying the dealing process with equipment operated by modernized mobile-compatible software.
Performance</br>

Performance

Using the embedded software equipment, a skilled operator deals 10+ sets of 32 boards of bridge cards in total, per hour.
Optimization</br>

Optimization

The duplicate bridge tournaments organization is more cost and time-effective with the dealing machines powered by embedded software.