Collaborate Disseminate
If you spend much time around industrial processes, you may have seen a vibrating bowl feeder at work. It’s a clever but simple machine that takes an unruly pile of …read more Continue reading Feed Your Fasteners in Line, With a Bowl Feeder
Few things hold as much promise as the old coin jar. Unfortunately, what’s generally promised is tedium, as one faces the prospect of manually sorting, counting, and rolling the accumulated …read more Continue reading Automatic Coin Sorter Brings Order to Your Coin Jar
If there’s an unsung hero of manufacturing, it’s the engineer who figures out how to handle huge numbers of small parts. It’s one thing to manually assemble something, picking each …read more Continue reading Compressed Air Keeps Screws Moving Through Modular Production System
[Andrzej Laczewski] has something big in mind for small parts, specifically SMD resistors and capacitors. He’s not talking much about that project, but from the prototype 3D-printed bowl feeder he built as part of it, we can guess that it’s going to be a pretty cool automation project.
Bowl feeders are common devices in industrial automation, used to take a big pile of parts like nuts and bolts and present them to a process one at a time, often with some sort of orientation step so that all the parts are the right way around. They accomplish this with a …read more
Continue reading A 3D-Printed Bowl Feeder for Tiny SMD Parts
Search for “bowl feeder” on Hackaday and you’ll get nothing but automated cat and dog feeders. That’s a shame, because as cool as keeping your pets fed is, vibratory bowl feeders are cooler. If you’ve seen even a few episodes of “How It’s Made” you’re likely to have seen these amazing yet simple devices, used to feed and align small parts for automated assembly. They’re mesmerizing to watch, and if you’ve ever wondered how parts like the tiny pins on a header strip are handled, it’s likely a bowl feeder.
[John] at NYC CNC is building a bowl-feeder with Arduino …read more
