Are you a bit obsessive compulsive with lots of certain things? We are too. Like Skittles! If you’re the kind of person who likes to sort their Skittles, you should seriously look into making your own 3D printed Skittles Sorter.
Built more to challenge his new 3D printer, [MrPrezident] was looking for a project to combine mechanical design with a bit of image recognition prowess — so he came up with this clever, and compact, Skittle sorting machine.
It uses an Arduino Uno with a ZITRADES color sensor module to identify the color of each candy. A small LED helps illuminate the Skittles to ensure an accurate color reading. Then, depending on the color, a series of gears rotate the Skittles piece to its designated color repository.
Theoretically it should also work with M&M’s (which are a bit smaller) but unfortunately, there are 6 colors of M&M’s and only 5 colors of Skittles. What would the machine do then!? We don’t see a reject bin!
Regardless, we’re quite impressed with how compact he ended up making it — [MrPrezident] has certainly been keeping up with his STEM promises!
And if you need something a bit faster to satiate your OCD… try this one instead. It’s capable of sorting Skittles or M&M’s at a rate of 80 pieces per minute!
It’d be really cool if it had a sixth bin for all non Skittle candies, I know that’d need a lot more hardware than a color sensor, but it’d be neat.
A way to check for “M” logo on candies in case of pankster who mixed Skittles and M&M
And discard the W’s.
Definitely cool but did it lose track of the skittles in the central sorter because there where like four or five that it just kept sorta ignoring or where those possibly like calibration samples?
Yeah re watching it, it seems to use those as some sort of calibration and reference to the color and destination of what it is sorting. Which is pretty cool :)
Yeah those are calibration skittles. That way it can recalibrate every time it restarts. Also, it allows you to sort any type of skittles. You just need to swap out the calibration skittles with whatever flavors you want to sort.
Finally 32 years after the US Festival in ’83, a potential solution to the Van Halen brown M&M problem!
well, you still make a minion pick out the brown ones because lol and then you feed the rest through the automatic sorter
You beat me to it. :)
you do actually know why that was in their contract/rider, right? it’s actually genius.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232420
Now add an ESP8266 with an embedded webserver to display the number of Skittles of each color for each run and cumulative. :)
Only a matter of time before someone uses this method to solve Rubik’s cube. Just put your scrambled cube in there and it will peel off all the stickers and sort them by color :)
Seems like it would be faster if it only moved in one direction, read a skittle, made a note of what color was in the slot and then moved one more space, read the skittle, noted what color was in that slot, etc and then dispensed skittles as they happened to advance to the right dish instead of reading a skittle and then rotating to dispense it immediately, etc.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking originally, but that doesn’t quite work well with this design. The bottom disc only has one hole, so you have to move that hole to the skittle each time anyway when you want to dispense it, and if you put more holes in the bottom disc, then you don’t have any way to distinguish between which skittle you are trying to drop. I have both the top and bottom disc moving at the same time to speed things up, so you only have to wait for whichever disc happens to be the farthest away.
Could this be used to demix fruit salad?
A pick and place may be better
I’m imagining a serious and crucially important reason behind this question, possibly with lives on the line. It has me giggling.
If you are really worried about brown M&Ms, step back in time to 2005 to Parallax’s MSorter Kit which used a BASIC Stamp and a TAOS sensor to sort M&Ms. Ten years ago!!! The kit was excellent and I really wish it was still sold. It was rather slick; here are some good photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/107681084501564242230/ParallaxMMSorter
Actually 2003…. http://web.archive.org/web/20030927014027/http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/products/accessories/m_sorter.asp