As my program is completed, instructions have been made, and a drawing for making the sidewalls finally works (100% in MS Word does not mean 100%, I needed 107% to measure my screen),

I present here a swinging sorter;

The sorting belt uses a constant speed control with 2 color sensors with a different background to find the color and length of a passing pin.

It then gets dropped in a swinging arm that brings the pin to the correct bin (if known), else it will put it in the center bin, so you can put them back in the feeder for a 2nd try.

If the pins are to close to eachother, and the distance for these 2 bins needed to far, it will hold the pin and stop the feeding until it can continue. It tries to keep going as much as possible, 2 different pins in bins close to eachother are allowed to be together on the swingarm.

The feeding is done with a drum feeder.

The sidewalls are best lined with 160g/m² paper to prevent the hooks of the pins catching on the edges of panels/liftarms (They will do!) That's why I changed from my step-feeder to this one as these little pins rip plates from eachother.

 

Programmed with Pybricks, MicroPython.

Instructions + program available at https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-83411/Mr_Jos/technic-pin-sorting-machine-for-all-pins/#details

Edited July 29, 20213 yr by Mr Jos

Cool build

I really like how you have made the different parts of the machine to work independently from each other.

Did you face any problems during programming?

Cheers

Carsten

1 hour ago, Munchkin255 said:

Cool build

I really like how you have made the different parts of the machine to work independently from each other.

Did you face any problems during programming?

Cheers

Carsten

Thanks for the post,

Yes I did have many problems with it. I started making this MOC before I started my T-Bot Gantry. I had to put it aside, put my thought on something else and made the T-Bot. After that one worked I started again with the Pin Sorter. I completely deleted, in my opinion, a very nice pin feeder. It was a double stepper without a scissorlift underneath making it very low profile. But whatever I tried, stacked liftarms, panels, bricks, plates as material for the steps, the pins destroyed everything I made within 2minutes. The little edge get caught on the smallest edge between 2 Lego bricks and tear it apart. So I designed this drum feeder and as it worked reliable I could mass test pins, and didn't have to manual put them on the belt anymore.

The programming difficulty was to find the difference between Tan and LBG, Black and DBG and find correct lengths for these difficult colorsas they have near same color code with a certain background. Adding the 2nd color sensor made it possible to see all different pins, but still not a 1 minute job. Many hours of testing went into this MOC.

All 3 components have been designed to work as standalone indeed aswell. You can just remove the swingarm, and put a bin underneath and you have a pin counter, make it stop at.. [This just gave me an idea right now for a MOC to try later = Make an item counter, filling bags with certain amount of that 'thing', and then fill a new bag], ok so make it stop at a certain amount. Drum feeder could be used for axles, liftarms, etc.

Thank you for the reply.

What I really like about your machine is how you have both worked out great solutions for hardware construction and for the use of sensors, servos and programming.
The drum feeder is a perfect example of where the psychical construction have solved the problem. This is coupled with color sensors and servos for the sorting.

I thought that reason for two color sensors was just to measure length of the pins, but I can see how using two different backgrounds colors can aid in telling the difference between two very similar colors.

Once again congratulations on a fine build.

Cheers

Carsten