4 ms·

I want an open-source screw identification / sorting machine. I dump in a bunch of screws and bolts, and I know which are M4 x 3mm, which are 1/4" wood screws,

I want an open-source screw identification / sorting machine. I dump in a bunch of screws and bolts, and I know which are M4 x 3mm, which are 1/4" wood screws, etc.

jstanley 3y ago
My recommendation is not to jumble them up in the first place. If you have a bunch of small, used, jumbled-up fasteners, just chuck them in the bin. Small fasteners are cheap enough that it's not worth sorting them. I have a storage bin rack on my garage wall, with one bin each for (new, used) * (nut, bolt) * (M4, M5, M6, M8, M10). (Actually, in practice, I don't have enough of anything except M6 to justify separating new and old, so only M6 is broken down that way). But if you keep them sorted it saves a lot of time.
- frognumber 3y ago
  > Small fasteners are cheap enough that it's not worth sorting them. It depends if you count time in hours (you're mostly right) or days (you're wrong). I have a bin of small screws and bolts which I've removed from devices. An hour spent searching for the right fit can save 1-3 days shipping time. If I'm in the middle of something, the advantage of being able to continue with whatever I'm repairing / building / doing ultimately saves hours of time in the end too. Breaking up a task each time I need a part loses focus and velocity. What I'd really like is some machine vision system. If I remove fasteners from a laptop, I often don't know what they are. I'd like to be able to have the identified without having to look for service manuals. Ideally, it'd be attached to some way to sort too.
  - jstanley 3y ago
    They're not so cheap that you can just buy them when you need them. They're so cheap that you can keep them in stock! Totally agreed about how annoying it is to lose days to shipping time for trivial purchases though.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Having stock of everything you may one day need is going to require a lot of space though. I used to have about one grab bin full of all of the most commonly used metric and imperial sizes nuts and bolts (and only with hex heads) in my metal working shop and that already took up quite a bit of space.
      - riskable 3y ago
        Having stock of every possible type of M3 screw/nut you could ever need does not take up a lot of space and also doesn't cost that much. $100 and it'll feel like you have a lifetime supply of every possible type you'd ever need and because of the time saved over the course of your life (and inflation) it'll definitely be a sound investment. What does take up space is the part of your brain where you thought you had knowledge of every possible type of M3 screw/nut you could possibly need. After a few years of owning a "massive" collection of M3 screws/nuts that part of your brain will expand by an order of magnitude and suddenly you'll be looking to stock up on something like, "tapered torx head, alloy 18mm M3 screws" and maybe even nylon M3 screws/nuts. Example: A few years ago I needed a square M3 nut to go into a 3D printed part. "No problem", I thought. I have plenty of square-shaped M3 nuts. Except the square nuts I had didn't fit in the part! "What the heck? Why is the slot for the square nut so thin‽" Turns out there's a standard for thin square nuts, DIN 562 where the thickness of the nut is 1.8mm instead of the usual 2.2mm and I didn't have any of those. Now I have a little baggie of 50 M3 DIN 562 nuts (well, probably ~40 remaining) that is carefully marked separately from my other little baggie of regular M3 square nuts and I know better than to think, "I have all the types."
        jacquesm 3y ago
        True, small stuff doesn't take up a lot of space. But bigger stuff does and it really adds up. Hm, I didn't even know about the differences in square nuts, and I've been around the block a couple of times. Thank you for that new bit of knowledge. In return: setscrews... don't get me started on those. There are so many kinds, shapes and sizes that's a whole new category. And all manner of driver bits, I have so many of them I need to organize those too...
  - nolroz 3y ago
    I have a container I inherited when a relative died filled with little drawers of random nuts, bolts, screws and other fasteners that has saved the day several times over the years when I needed something. Spending a few min going through those drawers has saved me days and days of waiting for parts/going to the store/stopping/starting a project again. One thing that helps me when I'm disassembling something with an unfair number of fastener sizes is grabbing an egg carton, following a pattern I can replay, and using the carton to catch all the different sizes as they come out.
  - nemosaltat 3y ago
    This is the way. Over the years I’ve built up a good intuition for which cables, power ends, brackets, and fasteners might come handy later and I keep them on hand, broadly sorted into those categories. For example, those plastic kits of VESA screws that come with a new TV are nice to have around because they usually have assortment of machine screws, stand-offs and nuts, and they’re usually blister-packed.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Good way for my kids to earn some pocket money! Bonus: they learn about screw heads, threads, different kind of bolts, different kind of screws, nuts etc.
- InvertedRhodium 3y ago
  I do the same, even 3d printed containers to perfectly fit all my fastners in a single drawer. About 3 months ago I managed to pull that drawer out of the toolbox and spill everything over the garage floor. I wish I had a sorter for that day.
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    Sounds like what you need is lids. Have you done any redesigning to try and avoid a similar incident?
danbruc 3y ago
Some mechanism to separate individual items, a conveyor belt, maybe two cameras and then train some neuronal network on classifying the images. Training data is easily generated by feeding in a couple of boxes with known identical content. Not sure if you can get the neural network to generalize to before unseen dimensions, if not it will only work for sizes in the training set. Maybe some lights for more consistent lighting. Then you still need a bunch of containers to sort things into, maybe along the conveyor belt and pistons to push things into the correct containers or reject them because identification failed. If you want to cover a wide variety of sizes including very similar sizes, then it could maybe become hard for a neural network to get the sizes right? So maybe just let the neural network classify the items and orientation, then measure dimensions in the image, maybe using stereo images. This will however now probably require manually labeling training images. Do you also want to read the grade and specification? Do you want to deal with coated, old, rusty or dirty items? Interesting project, but that could take some time to get working reliable enough to be useful.

I want an open-source screw identification / sorting machine. I dump in a bunch of screws and bolts, and I know which are M4 x 3mm, which are 1/4" wood screws, etc.

jstanley 3y ago

My recommendation is not to jumble them up in the first place. If you have a bunch of small, used, jumbled-up fasteners, just chuck them in the bin. Small fasteners are cheap enough that it's not worth sorting them. I have a storage bin rack on my garage wall, with one bin each for (new, used) * (nut, bolt) * (M4, M5, M6, M8, M10). (Actually, in practice, I don't have enough of anything except M6 to justify separating new and old, so only M6 is broken down that way). But if you keep them sorted it saves a lot of time.

frognumber 3y ago
> Small fasteners are cheap enough that it's not worth sorting them. It depends if you count time in hours (you're mostly right) or days (you're wrong). I have a bin of small screws and bolts which I've removed from devices. An hour spent searching for the right fit can save 1-3 days shipping time. If I'm in the middle of something, the advantage of being able to continue with whatever I'm repairing / building / doing ultimately saves hours of time in the end too. Breaking up a task each time I need a part loses focus and velocity. What I'd really like is some machine vision system. If I remove fasteners from a laptop, I often don't know what they are. I'd like to be able to have the identified without having to look for service manuals. Ideally, it'd be attached to some way to sort too.
- jstanley 3y ago
  They're not so cheap that you can just buy them when you need them. They're so cheap that you can keep them in stock! Totally agreed about how annoying it is to lose days to shipping time for trivial purchases though.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Having stock of everything you may one day need is going to require a lot of space though. I used to have about one grab bin full of all of the most commonly used metric and imperial sizes nuts and bolts (and only with hex heads) in my metal working shop and that already took up quite a bit of space.
    - riskable 3y ago
      Having stock of every possible type of M3 screw/nut you could ever need does not take up a lot of space and also doesn't cost that much. $100 and it'll feel like you have a lifetime supply of every possible type you'd ever need and because of the time saved over the course of your life (and inflation) it'll definitely be a sound investment. What does take up space is the part of your brain where you thought you had knowledge of every possible type of M3 screw/nut you could possibly need. After a few years of owning a "massive" collection of M3 screws/nuts that part of your brain will expand by an order of magnitude and suddenly you'll be looking to stock up on something like, "tapered torx head, alloy 18mm M3 screws" and maybe even nylon M3 screws/nuts. Example: A few years ago I needed a square M3 nut to go into a 3D printed part. "No problem", I thought. I have plenty of square-shaped M3 nuts. Except the square nuts I had didn't fit in the part! "What the heck? Why is the slot for the square nut so thin‽" Turns out there's a standard for thin square nuts, DIN 562 where the thickness of the nut is 1.8mm instead of the usual 2.2mm and I didn't have any of those. Now I have a little baggie of 50 M3 DIN 562 nuts (well, probably ~40 remaining) that is carefully marked separately from my other little baggie of regular M3 square nuts and I know better than to think, "I have all the types."
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        True, small stuff doesn't take up a lot of space. But bigger stuff does and it really adds up. Hm, I didn't even know about the differences in square nuts, and I've been around the block a couple of times. Thank you for that new bit of knowledge. In return: setscrews... don't get me started on those. There are so many kinds, shapes and sizes that's a whole new category. And all manner of driver bits, I have so many of them I need to organize those too...
- nolroz 3y ago
  I have a container I inherited when a relative died filled with little drawers of random nuts, bolts, screws and other fasteners that has saved the day several times over the years when I needed something. Spending a few min going through those drawers has saved me days and days of waiting for parts/going to the store/stopping/starting a project again. One thing that helps me when I'm disassembling something with an unfair number of fastener sizes is grabbing an egg carton, following a pattern I can replay, and using the carton to catch all the different sizes as they come out.
- nemosaltat 3y ago
  This is the way. Over the years I’ve built up a good intuition for which cables, power ends, brackets, and fasteners might come handy later and I keep them on hand, broadly sorted into those categories. For example, those plastic kits of VESA screws that come with a new TV are nice to have around because they usually have assortment of machine screws, stand-offs and nuts, and they’re usually blister-packed.
jacquesm 3y ago
Good way for my kids to earn some pocket money! Bonus: they learn about screw heads, threads, different kind of bolts, different kind of screws, nuts etc.
InvertedRhodium 3y ago
I do the same, even 3d printed containers to perfectly fit all my fastners in a single drawer. About 3 months ago I managed to pull that drawer out of the toolbox and spill everything over the garage floor. I wish I had a sorter for that day.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  Sounds like what you need is lids. Have you done any redesigning to try and avoid a similar incident?

danbruc 3y ago

Some mechanism to separate individual items, a conveyor belt, maybe two cameras and then train some neuronal network on classifying the images. Training data is easily generated by feeding in a couple of boxes with known identical content. Not sure if you can get the neural network to generalize to before unseen dimensions, if not it will only work for sizes in the training set. Maybe some lights for more consistent lighting. Then you still need a bunch of containers to sort things into, maybe along the conveyor belt and pistons to push things into the correct containers or reject them because identification failed. If you want to cover a wide variety of sizes including very similar sizes, then it could maybe become hard for a neural network to get the sizes right? So maybe just let the neural network classify the items and orientation, then measure dimensions in the image, maybe using stereo images. This will however now probably require manually labeling training images. Do you also want to read the grade and specification? Do you want to deal with coated, old, rusty or dirty items? Interesting project, but that could take some time to get working reliable enough to be useful.