Hi Ben,
Wanted to pass along a show idea. Have you heard of Perler Beads? They're these little plastic beads available in lots of colors and you can use them to create neat art projects (think 8-bit, ascii art, etc.). I stumbled upon this hobby and instantly became a fan. Since I'm not very artistic, you can just enlarge sprite images from video games and use them as templates to arrange the beads -- a lot like Lite-Brite from ye-olde-times...which I never got for christmas as a kid... : P But I digress...
You can find Perler Beads in hobby stores and they come in big buckets by the thousands. Seriously...For about $15, you can get a bucket of 11,000 beads. Here's the catch. The colors are all mixed together. You can buy small bags of beads of all one color. But it's a lot more expensive that way.
Can you build a machine that will sort a bucket of the beads by color into individual containers?
I have no idea what would be involved, but I'm imagining an array of color detectors of some sort, a big hopper/bin to dump beads into, set at an angle to let gravity handle carrying the sorted beads down smooth chutes into the receiving bins, a series of several small pinball-like flippers to serve as traffic cops to direct sorted beads to the appropriate chutes/bins, etc. The sorting might have to be done in stages to avoid having an excess of small bins at the bottom (there are LOTS of different colors). The color sensitivity could be adjustable. So you could first dial down the color sensitivity to do a rough sort to get all the shades of Red, Blue, Green, etc. together. Then dump just the mixed shades of Red into the hopper and crank up the color sensitivity to do a fine sort to separate the Mixed Reds into Pinks, Light Reds, Dark Reds, etc.
What do you think? Have you seen anything like this?
Your show is a lot of fun. It's inspired me to start learning about electronics.
Please let me know if you need more details.
Happy New Year!
James W. Watts
Charlotte, NC
