Show Idea: Colored Bead Sorter

Sounds like an interesting idea.  A nice mix of sensors, automation, mechanical processes.

Here is a very simple color sorter using the Lego NXT.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wkT2xJd-YE

Thank you for the replies so far. It's nice that the color sensors exist and that there are similar works already out there to use for inspiration.

After thinking about it some more, here are some more design considerations for the machine:

• Fast. Very fast. It only takes me a few minutes to sort a handful of beads into piles of color shades. The machine should be finished with a hopper-full in the same time.
• Intuitively simple to operate. Chunky dials and clear buttons. Icons, not words. Very few controls. Think Coinstar machines in grocery stores.
• Elegant. Very little flim-flam...Uses as few parts (especially moving ones) as possible. Easy to fix if need-be.
• Fun to watch. See-through when possible. Everyone loves colors. And this will be a very colorful and happy project...So let the flow of beads be fast and entertaining to watch.
• Strong. It has to withstand use and abuse from a challenging target audience. Children.
• Portable. A nice-to-have. Should be relatively simple to dismantle and share with others.

I look forward to hearing more feedback and ideas from the Element 14 community. Thank you!

I forgot to mention that colecago above sent a link to a very nice looking color detector. Figured I'd paste it in here, too.

Color Detector Sensor:  https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11195

I did orignally but didn't want to post a competitor product unless I knew Newark didn't have it :-P

Cool idea but as one person mentioned, it would have to be faster, as in a LOT faster, than a human at sorting the beads to make it worth it.

On top of that, how would the separation mechanically occur? It's not like a potato chip factory, detecting burnt chips and ejecting them, or a coin sorter, where coins are different size and thickness.

-Ben

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the reply. Like I was describing at the top of the post, the way I see this in my head (a head with zero electronics experience, let me add) is that beads get fed into a color detector for analysis. The "scanned" bead's color information from the detector is sent to something (an Arduino board?) that decides which bin chute gate to open. The gate closes once the sorted bead passes it.

As for speed, I completely agree. It's gotta be really, really fast to be worth it. Perhaps some of the speed could be mitigated by having multiple arrays of detectors/chutes/gates, etc. But that also ramps up the complexity and cost and odds for stuff to break. I have no idea how quickly the color detectors work, or if their color sensitivity can be controlled. A lot of unknowns and variables. But I figured you and the element14 community would be able to do that cost/benefit analysis.

The idea of this machine came to me as I was sorting these beads manually. I figured surely a machine could be built to handle this task. I just thought it would be a unique project that blends many of the concepts you've covered in your show.

What do you think? Is it worth looking into?

James

for mechaical sorting, probably a binary tree style setup might work. Basicaly, at each node, a bead can go either left or right.

So the process would be:

• Measure color at the root node,
• set all the gates accordingly,
• bead to falls through to proper bin.

It looks like theres about 64 colors, so youd need 64 servos to control the gates. At each level you may as well just have all the servos go to the same position so youd only need 6 controllers.

assigning gates would be fairly straight forward since, ostensibly, it doesnt matter what jar a color goes in provided only that color goes in that jar. Binary tree allows for really simple adressing to the jars. Let 0 indicate to take left path, and 1 indicate to go right. Then 000000b goes to the left most jar and 111111b goes to  the rightmost.

for speed youd probably want to blow the beads down the tubes using compressed air. gates would likely be ball valvesso you could use some pvc pipes for the sorter tree.

ETA: I was browsing hackaday and stumbled across this. Its similar to my idea, but the levels slide to and fro instead of having some sort of internal gate mechanism.

Robert that sounds like a great solution.

Not sure if this would really work for the show, mechanical builds are very time consuming for us.

Perhaps a simpler version to demonstrate the concept? Pills, bolts, etc? Open to ideas.

I would love to see this become real. I know someone who would kill for one of these!

Robert's ideas sounds very cool. A neat way to simplify the decision trees.

And @Michael Takewell, I am one of those people who'd kill for it. Would be fantastic.

@Ben, even a proof of concept would be great. Just as long as it is doing the sorting based on color (not shape, size, weight, etc.) the things you wanna sort are up to you. @Nate Chapman shows a POC sorting lego bricks. It's slow, but works.

Would love to see you and your team tackle this!