51–60 of 75 posts
>> I have wasted a significant chunk of my life counting out small numbers of parts into bags and posting them to people. So, small parts like this are always counted by weight, and I'm wondering why you would spend so much time on a counting solution when "buy a scale" is right there.
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> I mean I'll be honest, it's still a car crash of a program I'm glad you said that so I feel a little less mean... I gave it another try but it still feels pretty dire. FPS is bad on a macbook pro with a 120Hz screen on simple models and sketches. I explicitly selected "touchpad" as the navigation scheme, but I still can't figure out how to rotate, and even figuring out panning took me longer than almost every other…
In touchpad mode, you can rotate by moving your cursor while holding option.
When we count pills, we use a simple device that has a flat part and a channel to count into. A hockey-stick-like spatula moves pills into the channel. The excess is poured back into the bottle the opposite way and the channel is then emptied into the bottle. I count in multiples of 3 so I don't lose my place. The last number is unique for every 30. https://share.google/VshUpiSioUh6rLg4q (Image link)
Can you explain the counting a bit more? I interpreted it as: For every three pills I put into the channel, I add +1 to my internal count. "The last number is unique for every 30" means... if you have a mental count of 13, you have 39 pills channeled? I didn't quite follow...
Serves as a sort of checksum, as long as you know roughly how many you have and just the last digit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So that explains why the smallest parts often have spares in ikea and lego builds. Is this done because of the error in weighing the smallest parts, so they have a margin for error by allowing for an extra 1 or 2?
> Is this done because of the error in weighing the smallest parts, so they have a margin for error by allowing for an extra 1 or 2? This is a secondary benefit, the primary benefit is if the end user loses/breaks one. That part very well could be show stopper (Ikea 110630 anyone?). Now the end user is stuck - has to call, you have to ship, do you charge? do you give for free? they have to wait. they're annoyed, you'…
That's very nice. The nut dispenser is very effective. Small, and feeds well. The screw dispenser is starting to run into jamming problems. It will probably start to jam more as the acrylic gets scratched and friction becomes worse. But it's manual and low volume, so jamming isn't a big issue. He's discovered that dispensing is easy, but order from chaos is harder. There's a whole theory of feeder design.[1] There ar…
It occurs to me that the screw counter's main difficulty is in orientating the screws.
The machine does solve that (as a product of all the shaking and jostling and doubtless unjamming), but judging by the length of the feeder tube it's not a very fun step. And the end goal isn't to have screws that are each oriented in exactly the same way, but instead to have a specific quantity of screws placed in each of a series of containers.
All of that effort to orient them so precisely does make them easy to count using the nut dispenser mechanism, but that effort is otherwise ultimately discarded.
I'm lead to wonder if the process of dispensing 6 screws could be accomplished more simply (ie, with less fiddling and shaking) by reducing the amount of orientation necessary.
Perhaps by using a sorter that puts the screws in a line, axially, without a preference for heads-first or threads-first orientation?
> You can probably guess my opinions on it though, the software is very good but the cloud-based vendor lock-in is grating, and the free tier is hobbled beyond the point of usefulness. On the plus side, being browser-based, it works perfectly on Linux. > The 1.1 release of FreeCAD should be soon. I really want FreeCAD to succeed, but blimey they have a big hill to climb. My fingers are crossed. Since these parts most…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean I'll be honest, it's still a car crash of a program I'm glad you said that so I feel a little less mean... I gave it another try but it still feels pretty dire. FPS is bad on a macbook pro with a 120Hz screen on simple models and sketches. I explicitly selected "touchpad" as the navigation scheme, but I still can't figure out how to rotate, and even figuring out panning took me longer than almost every other…
You definitely need to use a mouse with a middle button/scroll wheel, IME. With this, there are presets which work just like other CAD programs e.g. Solidworks. Without it, it’s very difficult to use, but that’s not unique to FreeCAD. The base UI is quite bad but there are ways to improve it - either through settings and better organisation [0] or via plugins. I’d suggest to watch a couple of tutorials specifically o…
> You can probably guess my opinions on it though, the software is very good but the cloud-based vendor lock-in is grating, and the free tier is hobbled beyond the point of usefulness. On the plus side, being browser-based, it works perfectly on Linux. > The 1.1 release of FreeCAD should be soon. I really want FreeCAD to succeed, but blimey they have a big hill to climb. My fingers are crossed. Since these parts most…
For 2D, sometimes I find it nearly easier to write the gcode by hand (or make a python program that writes the gcode for you). It really isn't as complicated as it sounds, especially if you can tolerate doing 3D in openSCAD.
Here's a link to the talk if anyone can bear to listen to me for an hour:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain the counting a bit more? I interpreted it as: For every three pills I put into the channel, I add +1 to my internal count. "The last number is unique for every 30" means... if you have a mental count of 13, you have 39 pills channeled? I didn't quite follow...
If you count by threes, the ones place is unique until you pass each multiple of 30 - 3, 6, 9, _8, _1, _4, where was I? I hadn’t made it to 30, ends with a 4, must be 24. 27, 30, 33, _6… Serves as a sort of checksum, as long as you know roughly how many you have and just the last digit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is this done because of the error in weighing the smallest parts, so they have a margin for error by allowing for an extra 1 or 2? This is a secondary benefit, the primary benefit is if the end user loses/breaks one. That part very well could be show stopper (Ikea 110630 anyone?). Now the end user is stuck - has to call, you have to ship, do you charge? do you give for free? they have to wait. they're annoyed, you'…
Just in case anyone is unaware: Lego does in fact ship single pieces for free, if you lose one.