Blocked Conveyor Belt | Lego Sorting Machine

I was expecting this for quite a long time and today it actually happened. I came to the machine, there was a big pile of parts in the scanner and the belt was jammed.


So far there is no feedback channel yet which would inform the control PC about the actual belt speed. So I was very lucky that for some reason the belt drive motor stopped and nothing got damaged. After disassembling the scanner the problem showed up pretty quickly.


A cheese wedge part got thrown over the guard rail and caught the conveyor belt at its seam.


The fix was pretty simple. I added some white tiles on the guardrail so nothing can fall behind it anymore.



Putting everything back together the view into the scanner now looks like this.


And after restarting the machine the cheese wedge happily left the scanner.


And it even got detected correctly. In summary I am really positively surprised that the machine until today accumulated over 135 hours of operation time with no severe mechanical malfunction happening. I am curious what will happen when the operation is scaled up in future. Might be worth having some kind of surveillance camera to be able to analyze mechanical problems after they already occurred.





Comments

  1. IronBitOctober 7, 2023 at 8:44 AM

    Hey, I'm absolutely loving the work you've done so far! Your overview of lego sorting machines especially! Do you have plans of sharing your codebase? I would love to attempt to implement it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. BrickSortingMachineDecember 9, 2023 at 12:01 PM

      Hey sorry for the super late reply! Yes definitely planning to share it. Just need to clean it from some private stuff but at least it's already on GitHub. Since it is a hobby project progress is slow and I cannot promise anything sry. Are you also working on a similar machine? Would love to see your ideas.

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