Simple screw counter
mitxela.com
mitxela.com
He's discovered that dispensing is easy, but order from chaos is harder.
There's a whole theory of feeder design.[1] There are clever tricks to orient strangely shaped parts using feeders made from passive components. A basic trick is to get parts aligned in one axis, then arrange it so that the ones that are backwards or upside down hit some obstacle or are not supported, so they fall back down for another try.
It occurs to me that the screw counter's main difficulty is in orientating the screws.
The machine does solve that (as a product of all the shaking and jostling and doubtless unjamming), but judging by the length of the feeder tube it's not a very fun step. And the end goal isn't to have screws that are each oriented in exactly the same way, but instead to have a specific quantity of screws placed in each of a series of containers.
All of that effort to orient them so precisely does make them easy to count using the nut dispenser mechanism, but that effort is otherwise ultimately discarded.
I'm lead to wonder if the process of dispensing 6 screws could be accomplished more simply (ie, with less fiddling and shaking) by reducing the amount of orientation necessary.
Perhaps by using a sorter that puts the screws in a line, axially, without a preference for heads-first or threads-first orientation?
Here's a vibratory bowl feeder doing exactly that.[1] This is the industry standard way to solve this problem. Look what happens once the screws are lined up without a preference for heads-first or threads-first. A very simple slotted rack gets them all from horizontal to heads-up. As is usual with such feeders, if something doesn't land where it's supposed to, it falls back into the bowl for another try. That's the anti-jam mechanism.
3D printing vibratory bowl feeders works.[2] Useful for when you need to handle thousands, but not millions.
This is more scale than the clockmaker needs, though. Unless his business scales up.
This is how pretty much every IKEA, LEGO, etc works with very small, cheap parts.
End users benefit because it's easy to drop/lose/break one.
This is a secondary benefit, the primary benefit is if the end user loses/breaks one. That part very well could be show stopper (Ikea 110630 anyone?). Now the end user is stuck - has to call, you have to ship, do you charge? do you give for free? they have to wait. they're annoyed, you're annoyed.
No one is happy.
The supply chain headaches for giving exact number of tiny parts is terribly expensive, relatively speaking. So you give spares because in the long run it's way cheaper.
For stuff bought online, e.g. Amazon, not much you can do.
Easier with heavy objects, and needs the variation on weight to be low for the number of items you're dispensing.
it's very easy to count <=5 visually, but if your package requires 12 nuts, repeatedly counting up to 12 is so stressful the poster built an entire counting machine.
Being upfront, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Just some arm chair engineer.
The poster needed 6 parts which is JUST into annoying. My personal thoughts are what they need isn't dispensing but alignment. Thinking deeper I can agree that weight might not the most efficient here.
They're building the aligning and dispensing tool but I argue that's over engineering the problem. If it's aligned it's VERY easy to count 6 via a mark along the track and just push it to the end against your finger and based on the mark you know you have exactly 6.
To me the hardest part to make "just work" is the dispensing, but if you remove that it becomes a much easier problem. There's enough sales volume, you can make a vertical fixture that is a stack of fixed aligning tracks. Your fingers become the dispenser. Sweep and move to the next track.
Just random thoughts.
> The 1.1 release of FreeCAD should be soon. I really want FreeCAD to succeed, but blimey they have a big hill to climb. My fingers are crossed.
Since these parts mostly seem to be laser cut acrylic (so mostly 2D), it seems like solvespace would do a good job at cranking out the designs. I haven't used it for a larger project like this though, maybe it was already considered.
I can't wait for the release proper, but I can heartily recommend everyone try the release candidates as well. I've got a feeling this is the tipping point for FreeCad like 2.5 was for blender.
- create a part - create a body - create a sketch - pad/pocket/revolve/etc - repeat with additional sketches to taste
I've also been using the proxy object thing, I forget the name, the button is a green blob, to "import" geometry from a master sketch into more specific sketches.
I'm glad you said that so I feel a little less mean...
I gave it another try but it still feels pretty dire. FPS is bad on a macbook pro with a 120Hz screen on simple models and sketches. I explicitly selected "touchpad" as the navigation scheme, but I still can't figure out how to rotate, and even figuring out panning took me longer than almost every other 3D program out there (blender, PrusaSlicer, macos quick look STL viewer, solvespace).
It still has a splash screen and takes quite a long time to load, like an application from the 90s.
Buttons and actions that are completely irrelevant to me are shown, but disabled, which gives a really cluttered feel.
There's still "part design" and "part" benches. No idea what distinction is being drawn there.
Obviously part of this is from me being inexperienced with the tool, but as a new user all these issues add up to something that doesn't feel approachable or enjoyable to use.
Solvespace has its own issues, but at least it opens instantly and is generally a joy to use.
I'll watch some others slog through FreeCAD 1.1 though so I don't have to, and maybe I'll learn something.
Lots of it is single-threaded, which is an endless frustration on a machine with umpteen cores. Especially frustrating given that it means compute happens on the UI thread.
The splash screen can be disabled and it takes 3 seconds to start on my mac. Fusion however has two splash screens (first a regular one, then one that covers the whole app window) and it takes 32 seconds to load! (to be fair, once loaded it's much better than FreeCAD).
The base UI is quite bad but there are ways to improve it - either through settings and better organisation [0] or via plugins.
I’d suggest to watch a couple of tutorials specifically on 1.1 ([1] was my entry point) as every CAD program had quirks and frustrations at first. I’d say that for hobby-level creations, 1.1 now has ~80% of the usability of Solidworks, once you figure out how.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the performance on your system; I’ve used various 1.1 versions on a Windows laptop and a MacBook Pro and they’re both sufficiently performant. (I usually use a development or RC build from GitHub [2])
[0] https://youtu.be/LKq7hgbu7ks
It is sad that FreeCAD gets all the attention. If Solvespace had some of it, and the development time following from it, it could get improvements and some of the cool stuff in their pipeline. That would IMO make it a much better CAD program than FreeCAD could ever become.
Solvespace can also do a lot of useful 3D stuff, but it's also missing a lot so I can't in good faith recommend it for any arbitrary CAD work.
Here's a link to the talk if anyone can bear to listen to me for an hour:
I count in multiples of 3 so I don't lose my place. The last number is unique for every 30.
https://share.google/VshUpiSioUh6rLg4q (Image link)
I interpreted it as: For every three pills I put into the channel, I add +1 to my internal count.
"The last number is unique for every 30" means... if you have a mental count of 13, you have 39 pills channeled? I didn't quite follow...
Serves as a sort of checksum, as long as you know roughly how many you have and just the last digit.
I don't know any better, but the screw counting mechanism seems awkward. Imagine the set has 10 components..
I'm surprised there is no standard solution to this - like a tape and reel solution? A counting and dispensing gun that works for different sizes? But how much more would anyone pay for M3 bolts on a tape?
Helmke had a tube feeding his dispensers in one of the videos, with bolts lengthwise. That tube idea could be used for a manual dispenser - imagine a drink dispenser, but giving 3 bolts. Maybe easier to store away, but just as awkward to load.
It is a clever mechanism to separate a wide range of parts. Like a vi Rating feeder, but without adjusting the device for different object sizes. It is a rotating tube, slightly angled.
How would that help? Say - you have just one tube to seperate parts. You drop your first box of washers and route them into a sequential storage. They you do the next box with bolts on the same device and drop them into another sequential storage.
They dispensing remainds still manual as mitxela showed.
The free tier is identical to the standard tier except you can not create private documents and it has a no commercial use clause. This has been the case for many years, so I'm not sure where "hobbled beyond the point of usefulness" is coming from.
a medium scale problem = a better assisting device
a large scale problem = hire people
Basically there's a ton of traction at the zero-to-one (making the first prototype) and then you start looking at how to "scale" your manufacturing (ie: making 10 at a whack), and then eventually you MAY get to building/assembling 100 at a whack, and up to 1000's or more (where you'd "graduate" to partnering with a "real" manufacturer).
Maybe it's just the way that I'm wired, but I've done 3-4 projects where I've gone down the B.O.M. rabbit hole and have scaled to at least 100 assembled/packaged items.
It seems like a local makerspace is the perfect launch-pad for having flexible "staff" (ie: other makerspace members) that can handle ambiguity and would be invested in the success of a locally owned/managed product!
So glad my ex didn’t have one of these
>> I have wasted a significant chunk of my life counting out small numbers of parts into bags and posting them to people.
It wasn't very precise but you could move a lot of money in ball park with this method. Atleast internally across branches.
The lower limit is hard-set at 6 because the kits that he's producing and selling require exactly 6 of these screws for end-user assembly.
A small cup that would reliably scoop out at least 6 screws and no more than 7 or 8 screws sounds like a simple and elegant concept.
What does this cup look like? Is it faster to use this cup than counting by hand is? (Is it faster than the reproducible screw counter that he's already built?)