Made a little card chute for the skittle to fall down, and attached it to a servo motor which rotates it in 45 deg increments to match the 5 colour buckets it'll fall into.
The skittle chute is done and ready to be digitised!!! 🥳🥳🥳
Was super frustrated last night because I couldn't figure out how to cut out the pieces so that the servo motor platform under the chute was flat. 3 hours and a mountain of tiny cardstock prototypes.
Tonight it just worked out. YAY. It's sooo satisfying. 🥰
The servo moves in 45° increments to account for the 5 buckets I want to sort the skittles into.
// Yellow 🟡
servo.write(0);
delay(2000);
// Orange ðŸŸ
servo.write(45);
delay(2000);
// Red 🔴
servo.write(90);
delay(2000);
... etc.
Now we have:
🥳 The hopper: The box with a funnel inside for dumping all skittles in and getting one out the bottom.
🥳 The conveyer belt: Catches the skittle, moves it to the half way point to get it's colour checked, then to the end to drop through the bottom.
🥳 The colour sensor: Identifies all colours, need to narrow down to 5 tho.
🥳 The chute: Moves the skittle to the correct bucket.
🥳 OLED screen: For flashing up skittle colour (unnecessary but fun).
🥳 Servo motor: For moving the conveyer belt and chute.
Next step is to make another full prototype, and figure out how to align and attach the pieces so they work together well!! Oh and to make the buckets.
After that, I want to see what I can remove from the build to be more efficient (space mostly).