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I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1]. I get custom character flap
by scottbez1 2y ago
I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1].
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hmez4p2p https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hme...
[1] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap
- pshushereba 2y agoPlease keep up the great work on this! I love this split flap project. It's gotten me into electronics. I haven't had the chance to build it out yet, but I want to put together a sign as a project.