Marble Sorter Engineering

This is an engineering project of mine from last year. The objective was to design and program a machine that could read the color of a marble and then sort it accordingly into its designated bin. The materials used were provided by fischertechniks and the program we used was called RoboPro.
How it works: The machine uses a conveyor system to push the marbles up a ramp and into a small saddle. When the marble is sitting in the saddle, a small bulb shines light through the marble and is read by a photo cell on the other side. The program takes this information and translates the data into a specific color. When the color is identified, the program directs the wheel underneath the saddle to turn to the necessary bin. Once 9 marbles have passed through, the machine resets itself to its initial position and the program terminates. The biggest challenge of this project was designing the program so that the spinning wheel would know its current position at all times. Initially we thought this could only be achieved through the use of a potentiometer, but after further investigation we found that we could give the motor a sort of "temporary memory"' by the use of variables in the program. In the end, this machine sorted 9 marbles in a time of 15 seconds.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• MIT
• Aerospace
• Amarnath
• Marble