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by Animats
2857 days ago
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Nice. This is standard industrial feeder technology, done with Legos. Here's a commercial bowl feeder, which uses many of the same tricks.[1] Here's a discussion of the design principles.[2] You don't try to align the parts much; you just push or drop the misaligned ones back into the feeder for another try. It's good that people are doing this. The US doesn't have enough production engineers, and stuff like this is how you learn that kind of job. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsJzSFVAnhk
[2] https://www.autodev.com/vibratory-feeder-bowl-orienting-part... |
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Something as seemingly simple as retrieving parts from a bin of bulk pieces, singulating them so they're in a straight line and correctly spaced, making sure they are all oriented in the same direction and then passing them off to another moving sub-assembly all the while achieving a spec of "no more than one jam every 5,000 pieces" and still maintaining sufficient throughput is amazingly difficult. Especially doing it while avoiding all the other patented solutions.
The subtleties of, say, fixing a problem by making a tab just 0.05" shorter need a level of skill that's only obtained through decades of honing your craft.
A nice discussion of doing something similar with zipper pulls:https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364