The process looks like magic. Color-mixed items go in, and single-color items come out, on a line going so fast that no human can see what's happening. It's amazing to see computer vision systems that fast.
These machines work by putting the items on a conveyor belt, then dropping them on a much faster conveyor to spread them out. The fast conveyor goes past cameras, and at the end, launches the items into free flight for a few inches. While in flight, computer-controlled air jets knock out the rejects.
But it doesn't just reject every bad seed, instead it will optimize to keep within legally accepted limits.
This is just... I guess the emotion you feel when reading the last paragraph defines you as either technical guy (outrage / resignation, depending on your age and experience) or managerial guy (pure delight).
I am guessing there is a switch that makes it sort properly, you know, for VIP?
You feed the whole grape clusters, machine remove each individual berry from stem and then rejects all the unripe/damaged berries and little debris. All in speed of many tons per hour.
All of those are incredible machines, I wish I can buy it for my winery, but even small machines costs something like mid sized house.
My partners and I were bidding to design the machine... we didn't get the job.
Speaking of air bursts, here's an example of the sort of valve that gets used to actuate (with precise timing constraints) the air burst:
Coincidentially I'm working on something similar at the moment only with an order of complexity that is several magnitudes larger than the one on display here (39000 different shapes, several 10's of possible colors). But my contraption doesn't nearly look as nice as this one and definitely is not ready for any kind of production.
I've been working on this for the last two years or so, it has just about every bit of my skills exercised (optical, mechanical, software, electronics) and every time there is a minor breakthrough I feel like throwing a party.
Likely this piece of gear will never see the light of day in a commercial setting but it's the most fun I've had in a long long time.
Disillusioned with web programming (security really spoiled the fun I used to have making web stuff) I figured I should do something that will make programming fun again and at least on that count I have succeeded.
And on another note, I've gained a lot of respect for the visual cortex and it's preprocessing capabilities.
Yes!
It's become a deliberate strategy of mine to set the subgoal complexity in my personal projects such that I get a small "yes! it works!"-rush about once per week or so. It's what keeps me going on larger projects, even if occasionally some part takes longer to do.
You've given me some motivation to get off of HN and work on one of my side projects for the rest of today.
> I started working on this machine in May ’16 and only finished it in December. It took a lot of time to design and build the machine, and I kept optimizing the parts and software after the first prototype was done. Including all prototypes and spare parts, I spent nearly €500 on this machine. Well worth it, considering everything I learned.
This is the kind of stuff that I love to read about in the mornings.
I know this machine will not solve world hunger or bring about world peace but I know this would bring peace to my family.
I apologize in advance but I am going to "borrow" your design and work with my kids to recreate this.
Thank you for giving me something worthwhile and productive to do with my kids today. Atleast give them something inspiring and fun to look forward to.
I'm curious, have you tried putting both Skittles and M&M's in the same batch? I'd be interested to see if it determines that the purple Skittles and the brown M&M's are the same color, for example
(Technically it we don't see it make the mistake, but it probably had made a mistake...)
Awesome job! Any stats on its error rate?
The machine sorted the pennies to match a greyscale image given as input, so that the final output is a penny mural ready to be encased in epoxy.
Also, what's the difference between processing M&Ms and Skittles? Is it just the expected colors?
> So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl ... well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
apparently they don't want the green ones : http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
I don't think I could punch that much effort into something i wasn't going to commercialize.
