Collaborate Disseminate
Candy-sorting robots are in plentiful supplies on these pages, and with good reason — they’re a great test of the complete suite of hacker tools, from electronics to machine vision to mechatronics. So we see lots of sorters for Skittles, jelly beans, and occasionally even Reese’s Pieces, but it always …read more
Continue reading “Hey, You Left the Peanut Out of My Peanut M&Ms!”
Sorting M&Ms is really only a major concern if you happen to be working on a Van Halen tour, but it’s a fun excercise nonetheless. It’s for this reason we see plenty of sorting projects come our way, varying from the breadboard and cardboard variety, all the way up to final university projects. Today, [Karl] has blessed us with their sculptural-grade offering, and the attention to detail is stunning.
The project has been in gestation in [Karl]’s mind, on and off, for 10 years or so. The big problem centered around reliably seperating out one M&M at a time from …read more
If you have OCD, then the worst thing someone could do is give you a bowl of multi-coloured M&M’s or Skittles — or Gems if you’re in the part of the world where this was written. The candies just won’t taste good until you’ve managed to sort them in to separate coloured heaps. And if you’re a hacker, you’ll obviously build a sorting machine to do the job for you.
Use our search box and you’ll find a long list of coverage describing all manner and kinds of sorting machines. And while all of them do their designated job, 19 …read more
Continue reading M&Ms and Skittles Sorting Machine is Both Entertainment and Utility
College engineering projects are great, because they afford budding engineers the opportunity to build interesting things without the need for financial motivation. Usually, some basic requirements are established, but students are free to get creative and build something that appeals to them personally. For our readers, mechatronics courses are ripe for these kinds of projects, as the field combines electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and programming.
[Ethan Crane] is in just such a course, and had a final project due with only one real requirement: it had to use a PICAXE. Obviously, this gave [Ethan] quite a bit of freedom to …read more
