When it comes to LEGO and sorting, the idea is usually to sort bricks by color, which is a great way to help keep your sanity. And if you want to buy more, you may need to save your pennies and so on. What better way for worlds to collide than to build a working LEGO coin sorter?
[brickstudios]’ sorter does it all — pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollars. As with most coin sorters, the idea is to differentiate by size. This brings up challenge number one — the fact that a penny is ever-so-slightly bigger than a dime.
[brickstudios] was able to solve this by leveraging the difference between a headlight brick and a regular modified 1X1 with a stud on the side. Later, the same two coins reveal challenge two, which is that if you want to sort the coins in order by value, you have to somehow get the dimes past the pennies and nickels after each has fallen through the chute. Same deal with the giant half-dollar and smaller dollar coins.
The basic sub-build is a pair of tile rails on which the coins slide and either fall into the hole or keep going based on value. Once [brickstudios] had all the coins falling just right, it was time to address the value vs. size issue. Essentially, they solved this by building a ramp that turns the dimes and dollars and gets them to the right spots. Be sure to check out the build video after the break.
We are constantly amazed by the things people can make out of LEGO, like this hydroelectric dam or this hydraulic excavator. Have you made something amazing? Let us know!
I misread it to be a machine that sorts *Lego* pieces. Now that’d be a feat. Strap to a Roomba chassis and sell one to every rich kid’s parents in the world 😉
They have some very basic/rudimentary ‘sorters’ you can buy where you dump your Lego in at the top and shake the bucket (my kids’ bucket looks like a Lego figure’s head), and the parts sort out by size. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s good first pass and easy for a elementary school kid to use.
Sorting the coins in the order of their value seems a bit OCD to me.
But, the challenge was accepted and completed.
Just sort your coins using a physical neural network.
No, I’m not saying to have a human do it.
I’m saying do it like a neural network would.
1. Get a giant board.
2. Pound a bunch of nails into one side.
3. Dump coins in the top. Observe where the coins end up.
4. Randomly move the nail locations around until the coins end up being grouped together at the bottom.
It will work.
The only problems I can see are how big a board you might need, and how many iterations it will take to find the right locations.
If this seems silly…
Maybe we also shouldn’t be dumping gigawatts of electricity into trillions of dollars of computers IRL just to make a chatbot, so a company can pay a bit less than hiring a person…
That DOES seem silly huh?