Maker Develops Robot to Sort Skittles and M&M’s – ENGINEERING.com

Willem Pennings is a young New Zealander living in the Netherlands. As an engineering student and maker he's received lots of attention for his projects, and this week I saw his color sorting robot pop up in a few different places.

The base function of the machine is to take a set of colored objects and sort them into separate bowls. M&M's and Skittles are the objects that the machine currently sorts, with a button to toggle between them, but Willem's machine specification page says that any colored object with a regular shape and even dimensions can be sorted.

Breaking the machine down into systems shows that both the mechanical and electrical projects are very well done. The structure and frame were designed in CAD and 3D printed or built from copper tubing and wood. Even the pillars, their only function seemingly to separate the top hopper section from the bottom sorted section, are an elaborate assembly of laser cut elliptical wooden discs with separate channels for wiring and connection laminated together. Two Arduino Nanos and two EasyDrivers are used to control the device. One Nano controls the color sensor and sorting function, the other controls the complex lights and effects built into the robot. The EasyDrivers control the two stepper motors that pull the candies down from the hopper without jamming the system, and turns the sorting tube back and forth between the different sorting bowls. Even the decorative bells-and-whistles system of decoration is intricate, with an LED strip built around the outside of the machine, and six LEDs nested in the bottom of the upper plate to shine down on the six sorting bowls. The power and candy selection buttons also light up, giving the full machine a great glow in several directions.

This is an amazing machine built with an eye on both form and function. It's obviously a maker project with independent spirit involved but the finished product looks more like an IKEA showpiece than a robot built in a garage. The machine was built between May and December 2016, and Willem estimates that the full build cost around 500. Color sorting robots, specially robots to separate Skittles or M&M's, aren't new and many can be found with a quick web search, but this one is definitely a great example of engineering and design. The project build page is incredibly detailed with notes on the design, the components, the process and materials used.