· Brick Sorter 1

May 2005
                 

This brick sorter does things a little different...

This brick sorter consists of three main parts: The "rattler" (green; I will explain this later), the conveyor belt (blue) and the sorter itself (the part with the RCX).
I know a pictures say a lot more than 1000 words, so use them to understand the design, since I have plenty of them.
I also made a video of the sorter in action. You can get it here (1.28 MB), but I recommend looking at the pictures and descriptions first, because the video quality is not the best and you might not recognize every move without knowing what it's supposed to be.

This is the "rattler", and that's the part that differenciates this brick sorter from the thousands of others available on the net (or at least most of them). They all have one common defect: You have to place each brick manually so that the sorter works and doesn't get stuck. On my design, you simply drop the bricks on the rattler, no matter if they're upside down or lying on their side.
Every few seconds, the rattler, umm... rattles and due to its inclination, all bricks move towards the conveyor belt (behind the blue bricks) and one or two fall onto it. The conveyor belt takes care of them and...

...removes them from the "rattler drop zone". The green sticks between the rattler and the conveyor belt are designed to separate the blocks a little and avoid two bricks "sitting" one over another, which would confuse the brick sorter. The conveyor belt is always moving, while the rattler only drops new blocks every 5 seconds or so. This achieves greater separation between the bricks on the conveyor, assuring that only one falls into the sorter assembly at a time.

This is the connection between the conveyor belt and the sorting device. You can clearly see the light sensor facing towards a not-so-clearly-visible lamp on the other side. This lamp is always on, creating a very high reading on the light sensor (>90%).
When a brick from the conveyor falls into the sorter, this light beam gets interrupted (i.e. the light reading drops significantly). This stops the rattler and the conveyor belt, so no other brick gets into the sorter at this time. The lamp is now turned off and the light sensor reads the brightness of the brick.
This sensor could only distinguish black and white, but I am working on a color version. Stay tuned...

After the value of light reflected by the brick is measured, the brick sorter rotates and then drops the brick on a specified zone depending on its color (or should I say, its brightness).
This picture shows the gear system for the rotating sorter arm. You can also see the lamp mentioned earlier, as well as our wonderful furniture.
One thing I haven't mentioned: This is my first robot programmed in NQC! :-D Get the NQC code here.

A detail shot of the rotation gearing. The blue square is a rotation sensor that allows a much more precise positioning of the sorter. But one problem remains: Because of the use of pulleys (yellow), a tiny imprecision is inevitable. Look at the far right of the picture: The little white rubber band is part of a touch sensor that is used when the arm is rotating back to the conveyor belt and gets activated (in this case, released) when it is in the correct position. The rotation sensor is then reset regardless of its previous value. That same touch sensor is the long black stick you see on the previous picture, right under the red ramp from the conveyor.
If you haven't already seen it, here's the video file showing the Brick Sorter in action. (1.28 MB)

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