Planet Arduino

One of the most common complaints fielded by the agents of Big Candy regards the non-homogenous nature of their products. Skittles and M&Ms are two egregious offenders in this area, and it’s left up to the determined consumer to handle sorting these candies themselves. Of course, you can always do it by hand, but as we all know – machines will do the work.

This Skittle sorter is the creation of [Lewis] of [DIY Machines], and it’s a build targeted at the beginner level. Constructed out of cardboard, it uses a pair of servos to handle the transport of the candies into their requisite colored bins, via a rotating disc and chute. Skittles are scanned with a TCS34725 color scanner hooked up to an Arduino Nano, which changes the angle of the output chute to dump the candy in the proper location. The hopper is able to handle a standard 180 gram bag of Skittles without problems.

[Lewis] does a great job explaining each stage of the build, from the mechanical and electronic side of things, to the required calibrations to make everything play together nicely. The project teaches builders a multiude of useful lessons, like how to use limit switches and other concepts of automation.  We’ve featured [Lewis] on these pages before, too; his stylish shelf clock is a particular delight. Video after the break.

Taking pictures in the 21st century is incredibly easy. So easy in fact that most people don’t even own a dedicated camera; from smartphones to door bells there are cameras built into nearly electronic device we own. So in this era of ubiquitous photography, you might think that a very slow and extremely low resolution camera wouldn’t be of interest. Under normal circumstances that’s probably true, but this single pixel camera built by [Tucker Shannon] is anything but normal.

At the heart of his unusual camera is the TCS34725 RGB color sensor from Adafruit which receives a tightly focused beam of incoming light by way of a 3D printed enclosure and a 3mm OD aluminum tube. This allows an Arduino Uno to determine the color of this tiny slice of light, making up a single pixel of the final color image. [Tucker] notes that you could even swap the color sensor out for a simple photocell if you don’t mind a black & white image at the end of the process.

In either event, once the light has been analyzed the sensor is repositioned autoturret-style by way of dual BYJ-48 stepper motors. This process continues on, spiraling outwards until the whole image is stitched together from these individual readings

Now compared to the camera in your phone, the resulting image might be a bit underwhelming. We’d say it’s a bit like looking at a digital picture on an 8 bit computer, but in truth even that might be overly generous. But even if it isn’t as crisp as modern eyes would like there’s no question that it’s certainly a recognizable image, which is all [Tucker] was shooting for.

Of course if your optical frugality is such that even this low-resolution camera is too sharp for your tastes, we’ve seen a similar concept  using a roof-mounted solar array.