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Raspberry Pi Lego Sorter
- celticninja 6y agocan i rent it?
- junga 6y agoLego Sorter as a Service coming soon!
- the-dude 6y agoThis 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889
- hehehaha 6y agoI think it would be cool if Lego can install sorting machines in Lego stores. What a great way to increase foot traffic.
- frettchen 6y agoI 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.
- zwieback 6y agoMe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
- Symbiote 6y agoI 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/ https://en.hovedbanen.dk/currency-services/model-train-track...
- apples_oranges 6y agoI 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..
- mschuster91 6y ago> 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.
- jacquesm 6y agoPick 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G7pUqRZjU8 10 parts per second is pretty common now.
- frettchen 6y ago> 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.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI’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.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoThe 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.
- showerst 6y agoI wonder if they could do that onboard with a jetson nano.
- tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y agoHow 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?
- codefreakxff 6y agoThis 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
- tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y agoI'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.
- Symbiote 6y agoI think people buy bulk, mixed Lego on Ebay, separate it, and resell it in neat lots for a profit.
- smartbit 6y agoDate: Dec 3, 2019 Please update the title and append "(2019)"
- hanief 6y agoHere'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.
- hehehaha 6y agoOr 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.
- villgax 6y agoGood 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/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/
- paulkrush 6y agoThis 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 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 https://github.com/GemHunt/cable-robot
- salamanderman 6y agoHe 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-labeled-lego-training-images-ec74191bb4ef https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-created-over-100-000-la...
- amelius 6y agoLEGO 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.
- hehehaha 6y agoI 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.
- amelius 6y agoYes, 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.
- hehehaha 6y agoCouldn’t you randomly insert common objects to 3D renders?
- salamanderman 6y agoSomeone 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/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/
- amelius 6y agoNext: a machine that can put together LEGO bricks according to the assembly instructions?
- kube-system 6y agoI could see this kind of tech being very useful for the second-hand retail market, lego or otherwise.
- zwieback 6y agoVery 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.
- paulkrush 6y agoIn 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.