Raspberry Pi Lego Sorter | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi Lego Sorter

raspberrypi.org

115 pointsjustin6639 comments

> Raspberry Pi is at the heart of this AI–powered, automated sorting machine that is capable of recognising and sorting any LEGO brick.

> ...wirelessly sends to a more powerful computer able to run the neural network that classifies the parts.

"The heart" may be a strong term - the eyes and hands, maybe, but the brain, at least, appears to be separate.

Still a very cool project.

I’m surprised an RPI can’t be optimized to run the CNN classifier. It has up to 8 GB of ram and a pretty decent integrated GPU.

The problem is its GPU was always poorly documented or not at all since Broadcom considered it proprietary IP and never provided any detailed low-level documentation.

I wonder if they could do that onboard with a jetson nano.

This can't be right : it claims the worlds first.

I distinctly remember a Lego sorter here on HN, from one of our very own.

edit, here we go : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889

I had the same thought, that I'd seen one before. Thanks.

Watch the video. He mentions it by name.

Ahh, I see. Thanks for the pointer. I was too quick to dismiss, however a link to the one from @jacquesm does not hurt this thread.

I agree with you!

I think it would be cool if Lego can install sorting machines in Lego stores. What a great way to increase foot traffic.

I miss when stores in malls and the like would have weird contraptions of that sort (mobiles, pendulums, ball/marble race tracks, etc.) to catch your eye.

Me too. However, I'm glad I never used one of those X-ray machines they had in shoe stores of the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

I like the model railways in some large stations in Europe.

For example, here's the one at Copenhagen Main Station:

https://en.hovedbanen.dk/currency-services/model-train-track...

Here's a million dollar idea for LEGO Group (or any third party): make and sell a LEGO sorting machine. It should be portable enough, and flexible enough for wide ranging of application. I think it can sell loads of them.

Or just have them in Lego stores. People come and hand off their buckets. It sorts and bags them. Emails you the inventory which you can upload to bricklink to purchase missing pieces, etc. It’s really a great solution and gets people in the stores.

And considering the time it saves for people it’s more than a million-dollar idea.

This is cool. I didn’t know it was possible to use CAD now to build the network(correctly)!

If you did not have the CAD files and you were only searching for specific parts you can still build a network that is trained from a single Lego by varying lighting angles and camera pose and spatially correlating that part to itself. If there is huge variation in part types you might also need to infer with known lighting angles and camera angles as well. I posted a demo on this 4 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHm4Oz2sml8

BTW: If you know of other references to what I just described I would love to see them!

Over the holidays I built a $10 cable robot to get different cameras poses for this reason: https://github.com/GemHunt/cable-robot

He does say that the simulated images don't really work. He had to supplement the simulated images with 100k manually labelled images. https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-created-over-100-000-la...

How many legos do you have to have to build it and still have enough left over that you need a machine to sort through them?

This isn’t for sorting 2-3 left over pieces from built sets. This is for sorting bulk boxes of bricks like you might have after your kids play with their sets and dump everything into a big pile

I'm not against it as much as in aww because the device itself is made of A LOT of legos, so not only do you have a lot of legos from building the sorting device but then you have a lot of legos for the sorting device to be useful.

I think people buy bulk, mixed Lego on Ebay, separate it, and resell it in neat lots for a profit.

LEGO bricks are an easy thing to train using CNNs because there are no outliers. Unless of course the machine can recognize "non-LEGO" bits and put them in a separate bin.

I really like the part where you can train the ML models using 3D models. So you can train it indefinitely. That’s the meat of this project imo.

Yes, but the point is that it breaks when you have different stuff between your LEGO. Classifiers that can handle anomalies are a lot more difficult to train.

Most DL-based classification libraries skip over this fact.

Couldn’t you randomly insert common objects to 3D renders?

Someone posted a link to a prior lego sorter, and that article pointed out that there can be outliers because of the prevalence of knockoff and lego-compatible pieces. https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

In reality I think a Lego(or screw, or x) finding tool on a phone would find a 1000x more users vs a sorting machine. It's also a much harder problem.

I like watching YT videos of machinery in factories. There's some cool stuff there that works just like that sorting machine. Also it's very interesting to see how raw materials get changed, folded, molded, printed etc. until they are part of something else. Doesn't matter if it's a pencil, a poster or an nvidia graphics card..

> or an nvidia graphics card

The thing I find most impressive is how the PCB assembly service manages to populate the PCB with hundreds of different parts of which some are barely larger than a corn of sand on a beach, and that not a single one ends up misplaced or mis-aligned after the reflow process.

Pick and place robots for electronics parts are mesmerizing to watch in operation. They move so fast it is almost impossible to see the actual placement of a part start-to-finish, you see parts 'appear'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G7pUqRZjU8

10 parts per second is pretty common now.

Very cool. The vibration feeder reminds me of the time when I was building assembly lines, those feeders were always tricky to get right, even when feeding only a single type of part. We had bowl feeders, which feed and singulate simultaneously but that would be hard to do in Lego and impossible for multiple unknown part varieties.

I could see this kind of tech being very useful for the second-hand retail market, lego or otherwise.

Next: a machine that can put together LEGO bricks according to the assembly instructions?

Good effort but the editors could just google once in a while,

Jacques did it years ago https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

This is actually mentioned in the video.

I meant the RPi Editors

Date: Dec 3, 2019

Please update the title and append "(2019)"

can i rent it?

Lego Sorter as a Service coming soon!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com