[rkangel]

You're weighing the bag. Dispense a load in and divide the total weight by the unit weight and you know how many you've put in.

Easier with heavy objects, and needs the variation on weight to be low for the number of items you're dispensing.

[shellfishgene]

Sure, but how do the parts get into the bag?

[irjustin]

You grab a "rough amount" and by using weight all you need to do is diff 2,3,4? Ideally 5 and under.

it's very easy to count <=5 visually, but if your package requires 12 nuts, repeatedly counting up to 12 is so stressful the poster built an entire counting machine.

[shellfishgene]

Yes, the question is how exactly you grab a "rough amount"? If you need 4 parts in each bag, is it really much easier to construct a system that can dispense 4-6 parts, than one that can dispense exactly 4?

[irjustin]

Sorry i completely missed this. If you don't see it, it's okay - I probalby miss any replys going forward.

Being upfront, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Just some arm chair engineer.

The poster needed 6 parts which is JUST into annoying. My personal thoughts are what they need isn't dispensing but alignment. Thinking deeper I can agree that weight might not the most efficient here.

They're building the aligning and dispensing tool but I argue that's over engineering the problem. If it's aligned it's VERY easy to count 6 via a mark along the track and just push it to the end against your finger and based on the mark you know you have exactly 6.

To me the hardest part to make "just work" is the dispensing, but if you remove that it becomes a much easier problem. There's enough sales volume, you can make a vertical fixture that is a stack of fixed aligning tracks. Your fingers become the dispenser. Sweep and move to the next track.

Just random thoughts.