One of the most common complaints fielded by the agents of Big Candy regards the non-homogenous nature of their products. Skittles and M&Ms are two egregious offenders in this area, and it’s left up to the determined consumer to handle sorting these candies themselves. Of course, you can always do it by hand, but as we all know – machines will do the work.
This Skittle sorter is the creation of [Lewis] of [DIY Machines], and it’s a build targeted at the beginner level. Constructed out of cardboard, it uses a pair of servos to handle the transport of the candies into their requisite colored bins, via a rotating disc and chute. Skittles are scanned with a TCS34725 color scanner hooked up to an Arduino Nano, which changes the angle of the output chute to dump the candy in the proper location. The hopper is able to handle a standard 180 gram bag of Skittles without problems.
[Lewis] does a great job explaining each stage of the build, from the mechanical and electronic side of things, to the required calibrations to make everything play together nicely. The project teaches builders a multiude of useful lessons, like how to use limit switches and other concepts of automation. We’ve featured [Lewis] on these pages before, too; his stylish shelf clock is a particular delight. Video after the break.
Haven’t seen the issues of sorting red and orange with any of the other Skittle sorters. How about one that can sort a mixture of Skittles and m&m’s?
Could be possible by checking the size of them? I believe M6Ms are larger than Skittles?
Or maybe weight, or a combination of weight/inertia and surface area, meaning dropping them into a jet of air would possibly throw them different distances. Mixture skittles, normal and peanut M&Ms would probably sort skittles into nearest container or chute, choc M&Ms to middle and peanut to furthest..
Or maybe, an itty-bitty core drill to take a sample from the insides, analyze it with some makeshift spectrometer, decide about the type (M&M, Skittle, Peanut), then pass it to another color sorter. A dual camera setup with OpenCV to identify the “m” mark on M&Ms could come handy as well… Easy! :D
Just kidding… I saw another article here in HaD about a machine that uses a small load cell to measure weight and decide if it is peanut or chocolate.
Nope, sorry – it was in fact a 3D laser scanner that measured the shape to separate Peanut M&Ms from chocolate ones. My bad.
https://hackaday.com/2020/11/08/hey-you-left-the-peanut-out-of-my-peanut-mms/
I recall a load cell sorter of come kind on here also.
Try tasting them.
Don’t test too many..
But a 100% sampling rate is the only way to be 100% certain they’re sorted correctly, even if they do all end up in the same bin.
I would love to 3D print the mechanical components and just play with software. Do you have the ability to share .stl files? I’d be interested in purchasing them even.
“What is my purpose?”
You pass butter.
“…Oh my god…”