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A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

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Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#101

Post by jacquesm »

iDemonix wrote: post #91
jacquesm wrote: post #54

What a nice job this person did. Coincidentially I'm working on something similar at the moment only with an order of complexity that is several magnitudes larger than the one on display here (39000 different shapes, several 10's of possible colors). But my contraption doesn't nearly look as nice as this one and definitely is not ready for any kind of production. I've been working on this for the last two years or so…

If you can share: what are you working on, out of interest?

Sorting large volumes of Lego ... call me crazy :) (several metric tons worth)

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#102

Post by jacquesm »

WalterBright wrote: post #74
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a similar issue, IMO, with new home construction. There's a minimum legal quality limit for having a home be sellable, and anything past that basically doesn't get done. It's made worse by the home evaluation metrics - square footage, bathrooms/bedrooms, and location are most of what matters for getting a mortgage (and thus for bidding on and pricing a house). Like, if you look closely at a 100 year old house…

My house has a number of details that would never be put in a spec house, because only someone like me would be willing to pay for them. I expect when this house is sold, it will garner a 0% premium for those features. For example, it has GFCI breakers for all circuits, not just the bathroom ones. For another, it has a stainless steel sill plate (which keeps wood boring insects from coming up through cracks in the fo…

> For example, it has GFCI breakers for all circuits, not just the bathroom ones.

I did that to every house I ever lived in. It's good practice and as far as I'm concerned it really ought to be code.

Do you also have the habit of installing multiple utp runs into every room ;) ?

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#103

Post by zaf »

jacquesm wrote: post #101
iDemonix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can share: what are you working on, out of interest?

Sorting large volumes of Lego ... call me crazy :) (several metric tons worth)

Nice project idea. After you do that have a go at sorting out the Lego Mindstorms bits and pieces!

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#105

Post by jacquesm »

zaf wrote: post #103
jacquesm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorting large volumes of Lego ... call me crazy :) (several metric tons worth)

Nice project idea. After you do that have a go at sorting out the Lego Mindstorms bits and pieces!

Already part of it. It's all lego pieces, not just the bricks, basically any part lego ever produced (hence the approximately 39k shapes).

The problem is anything but trivial but I'm making good headway, proof of concept took a few months and for the last year or so I've been slowly making progress with a more robust and capable version.

It's a superficially trivial idea, any toddler could do it but to have a machine that does this with any degree of reliability is fairly complex.

If anybody is ever going to try something like this I'd give you just one piece of advice: control your inputs.

Anything you have to deal with in software can eat up capacity very fast so by conditioning your inputs the software can get simpler in ways that really matter.

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#106

Post by beachy »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #94
Hello71 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think this has to do with legal limits; you could probably sell a hut as a "house" in most places if you wanted to, as long as it was compliant with the building codes. The problem isn't that the government won't let you call it that, the problem is that nobody will buy just a hut, they want an actual house. While it may or may not be the case that 'house quality' has declined over the decades, that's…

>as long as it was compliant with the building codes Huts aren't compliant with building codes - and regardless, there's specific criteria you have to fulfill to get various statistics (square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen). Plus there are zoning restrictions on minimum building sizes, on top of regulations on minimum room sizes. >do house buyers want to pay 1.2x or whatever for those extra details? Even if t…

Is that a problem?

If the masses don't know or care then it's not a problem to them.

Whereas you, who do both know and care, can snap up superior quality houses at bargain prices.

Seems like a good situation to me.

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#107

Post by obitoo »

aubreykilian wrote: post #99
patrickk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coin sorting via weight or size would also be cool.

Technically something with just different sized slots for the coins will work, and let gravity take care of the rest...

Indeed, I had these as a kid in the 80s. Coins are simply inserted in the top right and roll down before falling into a stack. Hours of fascination! https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/303781937345711623/

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#108

Post by avar »

aaron695 wrote: post #92
ot wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Google SRE book they say that if a service has reliability much better than the stated SLO they artificially introduce errors to get closer to the error budget. This is to prevent over-reliance on the measured SLO rather than the stated SLO in upstream services.

This sounds very very odd? Why ride the line? It'd take one major issue then you're way over you error budget? For testing/simulations I can see why you'd introduce the errors.

One major issue and you stop artificially inserting errors, which are inserted at a rate such that you could turn off the error inserted within some timely manner and still stay within budget.

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#109

Post by gww »

Animats wrote: post #11

Here's the commercial version.[1] This machine is sorting peas by color. Peas. Individual peas. Each individual pea is examined by cameras for size, color, and looking like a pea. Rejects are kicked into the reject hopper by an air jet. There are machines like this for most fruit. Typical throughput is a ton per hour. Most fruit and berries go through such machines today. That's why the fruit at the supermarket is so…

There is a technology similar to this for sorting cells based on biological properties and fluorescent markers called Flow Cytometry. The machines typically allow "user defined" gates and schemes through interactive software.

Re: A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine

#110

Post by detaro »

jacquesm wrote: post #101
iDemonix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can share: what are you working on, out of interest?

Sorting large volumes of Lego ... call me crazy :) (several metric tons worth)

I thought it was Lego at first, but 39000 shapes seemed a bit much. I thought there were only 8-10k shapes?
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