My youngest son has thousands of Magic cards that he wants to scan. Instead of doing it manually, I thought it would be good to create a simple device to take a picture, move the card from the top, take a picture, etc.

Here you can see one of the early iterations of it actually working. It uses a PC cooling fan to pick up the top card. There is a light sensor on the bottom of the fan that is used to determine if the fan is in contact (and remains in contact) with the fan. There is one servo that moves it up and down, and another that moves it left and right. An arduino is used to control the fan and servos and monitor the light sensor. This is hooked up to a laptop that has a simple Python program running on it that uses the libraries from OpenCV to take the picture. The Python program communicates with the Arduino via the serial port.

Here is a video of it in action:

This was created a few weeks ago.  It took about 20 hours of experimentation, but it has scanned hundreds of cards.  There is quite a bit more work to be done on it to make it work as well as we would like.