Moving the Brick Sorting Machine Blog

I am currently moving the LEGO Sorting Machine blog to https://BrickSortingMachine.com. Would be super happy to see you there!

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LEGO Sorting Machines - an Overview

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Probably the best-known LEGO sorter is Daniel West's " WORLD'S FIRST Universal LEGO Sorting Machine " (Dec, 2019). According to Daniel, his work is inspired by Akiyuki's " LEGO Mindstorms NXT Vision Guided Brick Sorter " (March, 2011) and Jacques Mattheij's  Sorting two metric tons of lego  (April, 2017). Focusing on hardware, all three machines show a similar four stage design: Bulk storage → Part separation → Scanner → Sorter The following overview, will look at a larger field of machines and show the creative variety in designing each stage. Stage 1 - Bulk Storage In bulk storage you have a large amount of unsorted, entangled bricks and the goal is to feed it to the machine progressively. There are two typical designs used for bulk brick storage. Nr. 1 is what I call the "belt slowly moving under pile of bricks" type. Two nice examples can be seen with Daniel's and Jacques Mattheij's machines. From Daniel West's  The WORLD...
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Blocked Conveyor Belt | Lego Sorting Machine

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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...
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The LEGO Sorting Machine

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The preceding article provided a comprehensive overview of the wide range of existing LEGO sorting machines. Joining the release video below, this article will look into the details and individual components of our specific sorting machine, explaining the rationale behind various design decisions. Constructing a complete sorting machine requires developing a long list of components and addressing various design challenges. Given that this is a hobby project, there was a strong need to minimize development time and effort to achieve a functional system within a reasonable timeframe. The foundational decision thus was to construct the machine out of LEGO components itself. This safes on part manufacturing and enables rapid cycles of design and testing. Achieving long-term durability and high operational uptime presents a challenge when using standard LEGO parts. For this reason, the design incorporates non-LEGO components, such as  metal gear motors ,  LEGO compatible meta...
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