High speed M&M sorting machine | Hacker News Reader

High speed M&M sorting machine

reviewmylife.co.uk

219 pointsnbsymr43 comments

That's low-speed sorting. This is high-speed sorting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DogZJmThRSE

That's a high-speed computer-vision optical pea sorter. Yes, each and every pea in that huge flow of peas is examined by a computer vision system. Tiny high-speed air jets are kicking out the rejects during the brief period the peas are in free flight.

Here's a blueberry sorting machine, throwing out anything that doesn't look like a round blue blueberry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CyWvnh4YtE

That machine could sort M&Ms by color, easily.

The food industry has lots of machines like that. The technology was first applied to large fruit like tomatoes. It's now so cheap it's applied to rice and grains.

Ha, came here to post this as well. High speed is relative :] I've done similar hardware things in the past and my initial ideas when I read the orignal article were:

- what kind of sensor are they using that they need 2 seconds to scan?

- in comparision with 2 seconds, a phone camera with results sent over bluetooth is indeed fast. Not my branch at all, but I wonder what latencies he's looking at? Should surely be tens if not hundreds of mSec?

I develop sort/test software for a semiconductor manufacturer. The M&M sorter looks pretty fast to me :)

I don't get a sense how the first machine actually does the physical separation, but the second one seems to be an air jet or something?

That second machine seems to have quite a lot of false positives, but I guess better waste some blueberries than have to deal with customers finding beetles in their berries.

The pea-sorting machine, like all the small-item sorters, uses a row of small air jets controlled by the computers. Here's a more advertising-like video with slow-motion imagery of the action at the air jet station.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbSxlZ6J1h4

It's amazing that individual sorting of rice grains is affordable, but it is. Larger fruit and vegetable items used to be graded by people, but there are machines for that, too.

Machinery like this helps to make "Amazon Fresh" possible. With computers inspecting produce, there's less need for people to shop for it themselves. Webvan tried to do this 15 years ago and had quality complaints. That problem has been solved.

It's also led to a class of consumers that will not accept a slightly wonky carrot.

Sigh... They'll still buy it if it looks perfect but tastes like unripened cardboard. :/ (Homegrown, imperfect tomatoes rock.). "Imperfect" but edible food goes on to canning, pies and other manufactured items.

which led to the wonky carrots being sold cheaper to me, which I'm fine with.

I wonder, (and wouldn't be surprised) if the M&M factory already has something similar in place for Quality Control. Anyone working in/near the food industry know the answer to this?

I am pretty sure they get made 1 color at a time, they wouldn't be combined before being inspected... Why combine then go through a new machine to uncombine?

I am pretty sure dferr is referring to the pea sorter.

You forgot to add this little bit of info about your pea sorter:

Sorting up to and beyond 20 metric tons (44,000 pounds) of processed vegetables or fruit per hour

To quote my buddy from Maine, "It's WICKED FAST!"

I used to be in the field of ultra-high-speed flow cytometry. We were working on developing 1-mega-event sorters around 10 years ago.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cyto.a.20160/full

James Leary was our PI.

A friend of mine developed a machine that separates pistachios by amount of "openness" of the their shell. They user image processing and had to it one by one in a pipe because they had to scan the pistachio from multiple angle to make the decision.

My dad used to work for Key Technology. They did some fascinating stuff. They had teams of hardware engineers trying to push as much sorting logic into hardware to meet the speed requirements they were looking for.

I saw their stuff in action in french fry plants in Idaho. Awesome stuff, especially considering the hostile environment those machines are deployed in.

In what now seems like a previous life, I once had a job sorting produce by hand (mostly picking out stick/stems, and animal parts) from a conveyor belt zipping in front of me. Even back then CV machines existed for at least some produce, but the plant I was working at had not yet updated.

This kind of work required a dozen or more people standing along the (much slower) conveyor belt, each trying to grab what the previous worker missed. Even at minimum wage, that sort of labor isn't cheap. This is truly amazing technology.

Silly fool, this hobbiest! How dare he publish his homegrown, COTS work on the internet, lest we pedantic assholes compare him to well-funded, full-time engineering efforts.

Now I understand why the produce I get from the grocery store is always so bruised compared to the stuff I get out of my garden. Even the good product moves at quite a clip and is dropped quite harshly, too.

It's a little M&M flow sorter! They even kind of look like cells. If you really want your mind to be blown, go read about flow cytometers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_cytometry#Fluorescence-act...

Fluorescence-activated cell sorting uses the same idea as in the M&M sorter linked here, except with lasers instead of an iPhone camera and uses an electron gun to deposit charge onto a droplet containing exactly one cell as it falls through a magnetic field to sort it into bins. Madness!

Very cool. I just picked up a couple Mindstorms kits and have been debating my first build challenge. This looks perfect (though it won't be as quick I'm sure)

Edit: Just playing with the math regarding the speed of this machine considering the M&Ms are in free fall. Nicely done!

I'd like to see a variant of this capable of separating a mixture of M&Ms and Skittles.

So it puts all M&Ms in one pot and Skittles in the other? Or so that it can deal with all the different colours between the two? The first would be tricky!

Weight them with enough accuracy; <1g → M&M, >1g → Skittle.

http://www.scientificameriken.com/candy4.asp

I have never been in a mixed skittles/M&M scenario but would weight be easier than color in that instance?

http://www.scientificameriken.com/candy4.asp

This reminds me of a FACS machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_cytometry#Fluorescence-act...)

Is the code posted anywhere?

Very nice. If you want to reduce the shadows for sorting browns, try backlighting the chute so that shadows can't appear on it. Basically, turn the chute into a photography light box.

Thanks for the idea. I had thought about lighting the chute - But I hadn't though about backlighting it. That sounds like it could work :)

oh the glue, the glue! M&M sorters are great projects though. I am impressed that the bluetooth link has the frequency response to actually get to the blue ones before they have fallen what appears to be a few inches.

The sound is very rhythmic. One part of a sort machine band.

Somebody buy this guy a 3d printer.

Hobby 3D printers are basically only good enough to print their own replacement parts before they break again.

Here is a Skittles sorter built from 3D printed parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSEHDBSynVo

It looks like a hobby 3D printer was more than good enough.

if only this existed back in Van Halen's heyday

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen#Contract_riders

Came in here to see if someone would mention it. Glad to see I was not let down ;)

I first heard the story as an urban-legend-style tale about the crazy foibles of famous people, but I love that it was driven by practical considerations.

Smoking gun is more ad riddled than I remember it, but they post a fair number of concert riders.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstage

"This American Life" did a great segment explaining (as does your wikipedia link) why the M&M's were a legit safety concern--and not just a prima-donna move by self-indulgent rock stars:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/386/t...

IIRC, the reason they have strange requests is so they know the crew actually went through the list and fulfilled all requests. Asking for only red M&M sounds silly but if you see a bowl of red M&Ms in your trailer, you know the crew was more likely to be diligent with the other requests. Those other requests being sound equipment and safty measures.

The point wasn't to have red M&Ms, though they taste good, it was a test to see how well the crew followed instructions.

but can it sort Skittles?

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