V1 prototype for Skittle Sorting Robot

Recap of skittle robot progress to date, including where the idea came from, the first paper prototype and a first attempt at a 3D model for the hopper (the cube-shaped head funnel).

Aug 9, 2024

It's 1am and I can't sleep because I got an idea to build a journal entry style blog for keeping track of project progress. So have spun up a blank Webflow site that has a projects collection, and a journal entry collection.

So far, I've been writing micro blog LinkedIn posts about project progress so far. Here they are:
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  1. 22nd June. Comment on Nicole Robinson's post where I shared that her talk inspired me to want to create a skittle sorting robot.
  2. 24th July. All of the components came for my skittle sorting robot. I immediately adored the tiny 360° servo, and planned to make the skittle bot out of cardstock.
  3. 1st Aug. Sketched out a design idea on iPad. Skittles go into a funnel, fall onto a rotating wheel, then down a chute which takes them to a bucket.

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  1. 3rd Aug. Made a cardstock prototype following this YouTube tutorial, which doesn't work at all but I like it anyway.
  1. 9th Aug. Learned how to use Shapr3D to recreate the hopper funnel above, but as a model with the same dimensions of the wood panels I picked up for the real thing when I'm happy with the design.

After this, I started learning how to use the sensors and wires that came with the Ultimate Sensor Kit for the Arduino Minima R4 I picked up on Amazon from Sunfounder.

I'll create separate entries for these because they are deep dives in themselves!