One Engineer’s Quest to Tame a Mountain of LEGO Bricks Resulted in This LEGO Sorting Machine
SMRTR summary
Thousands of pounds of LEGO bricks sit ceiling-high in warehouses, waiting for someone brave enough to sort them by hand. Software developer Spencer decided that wasn't good enough.
After visiting Great Brick Lab, a warehouse where workers painstakingly identify duplicates and rarities by eye, Spencer set out to build the ultimate LEGO sorting machine using only parts from regular suppliers.
The feeding system proved most challenging. Early vibration channels shook so hard that blocks flew everywhere. Spencer's breakthrough came with an overhead camera running a modified artificial intelligence model that scans 15 frames per second, detecting jams before they happen and ensuring only single bricks pass through.
Once fed, bricks travel under bright lights where cameras photograph each piece and send images to a recognition system that matches them against a massive LEGO database in seconds. Little servo-controlled doors then spring open at precisely the right moment, shooting categorized bricks into slanted chutes.
The system can connect up to 750 bins, all controlled by a single Arduino brain. Edge cases that stump the AI get tossed into human review bins, but everything else finds its perfectly sorted home.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to TechEBlog.
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