As chance would have it, I find myself with a lot of spare time over the summer. This screams for a new project! Recently, I have made a list of skills I already possess and skills I would like to learn. So the project that I choose should help me learn a few of these.
After a lot of thinking I came up with the following: I want to make a machine that sorts my perler beads for me!
The kids have a box with countless perler beads in them, but most of their playing time goes into searching for the correct color. So, sorting the beads by color should help them use their time for actual building and increase their motivation to play with the beads.
The machine that I want to build should consist of the following parts:
- Bowl feeder that separates the beads to be processed one by one.
- Conveyor belt for transporting the single beads to a camera.
- Camera that takes a picture of each bead.
- Raspberry PI with a neural network that determines the color of the bead and controls the actuators.
- Actuators that push the beads into containers collecting beads of similar color. I’m thinking of electrically operated valves and pressurized air.
With this project I’d like to learn the following skills:
- CAD – using a CAD software to construct 3D parts
- 3D printing (at a service provider) of my designed parts
- image recognition with a neural network on a Raspberry PI
- pneumatic and electrically operated valves
The first challenge will be to design a bowl feeder specifically for perler beads and to manufacture it. More on that in my next post!