Hey It’s Christian here, this week we are looking at a very popular topic on the internet.  The Duel Disk & Holograms from the show Yu Gi Oh.  The Yu Gi Oh Duel Disk is something that has received a lot of requests.   People want to know if it’s possible to make a duel disk that can read cards and a project hologram monsters to fight with.  Since so many of you asked, I’m going to make one and show you how.

When I was deciding which to build, either the main dueling arenas from season 1 of yugioh or the much smaller and sleeker duel disks, I just had to ask the question. What do you guys want.   It’s clear that the duel disk is much more popular, so that is what i’ll do first. Building a whole duel disk and hologram system like this is a huge project, so we’ll break it up into a bunch of smaller parts.

Subscribe to the newsletter to see whole thing unfold as I build it and share how, so you can do one at home.  First let’s look at the duel disk, and how it works. The duel disk straps around a players arm, allowing them to draw & discard cards, and play 5 monsters and 5 magic or trap cards simultaneously.

For this first model, we’ll keep it as simple as possible and work on getting it to read cards in just one of the five slots. If we can do it once, doing it 4 more times later is not a problem. I see three ways we could have the duel disk reading the cards.

#1. RFID - Either attach RFID markers to each card or use RFID cards and add the monsters onto them. This is a great solution for determining which card has been played, but lacks the depth needed to tell where each card has been played, and whether they are in attack or defense position.

#2. Bar Code Scanner – This is probably the best way to catalog every card in the game. There are many bar code scanning program out there, to save a lot of the work you would otherwise have to do. It would require to add a bar code sticker or printed on each card in the right location.

#3. Visual Recognition – To recognize each card by it’s picture is beyond every vision recognition program in the world right now.  A simpler way to do this is by simple determining marks on the same location on every card, similar to the bar code.  If only using a couple cards for example, you could place a pink sticker on the Dark Magician Girl, and a Blue Sticker on the Blue Eyes White Dragon.

To keep this first prototype simple, we’ll go with option #3, using visual recognition. We will place a sticker on the front and back of both cards we are using for this, Blue Eyes White Dragon and Dark Magician Girl. I will be attaching a regular webcam onto the Duel Disk to read which card has been played, so the Duel Disk will need some modifications, join the newsletter to get that update and see how this project goes.