
This machine separates your Skittles into color groups so you don't have to - ColinWright
http://www.zagg.com/community/blog/invented-this-machine-separates-your-skittles-into-color-groups-so-you-dont-have-to/
======
squeed
I wonder how much effort the Skittles factory puts in to ensuring each bag has
a selection of all the colors. They certainly have some large high-volume
plant to do so.

It's funny to think of this carefully-crafted machine undoing the work done by
another carefully-crafted machine.

~~~
tmhedberg
Couldn't they just mix all the colors together in roughly equal proportions
(by weight, for instance) before packaging them into packets, and just rely on
the statistical improbability of a noticeable imbalance in colors? I doubt
there is actually a machine that counts out the Skittles by color and makes
sure each bag gets the right number of each.

~~~
viggity
as someone who has kept track of their skittles color distribution over the
course of a year, I can attest that there can be wide fluctuations in
distribution percentages.

I wish I had kept all the numbers, but IIRC, the "typical" bag would have
roughly 55-60 skittles, so the "average" color would have 11 skittles. It was
common to see a single color with only 9 skittles. I can't recall ever having
a bag have one color with less than 7 of any one color, but I would have on
occasional see one color get as many as 18 of one color.

Sincerely yours, a gigantic nerd.

~~~
bballbackus
> as someone who has kept track of their skittles color distribution over the
> course of a year

I mean did you not expect someone ask why? Also, why?

~~~
viggity
1\. I like the taste having an even distribution (i'd eat one of each color at
the same time). There was a stupid little pattern on how on how I'd eat the
extras to get each color to have an equal number. 2\. I started a very
statistics heavy programming job, so I thought it'd be fun to run some numbers
on something novel.

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Cogito
[EDIT] Adding some useful quotes from the radio interview and cleaned up the
facts

[EDIT] The homepage for the company is at [3]

A similar, though much larger, machine for sorting oysters was invented in
Australia a few years back (around 2006 by the look of it).

I can't find any specific web presence for the machine itself, but I managed
to dig up an interview with the inventor [1] and the episode of 'Inventions
from the Shed' I originally saw it in [2].

The basic premise, from memory, is to feed oysters into a chute via a conveyor
belt. The oysters are funnelled so that they drop in front of a series of
cameras set at different angles, which use shape recognition to match the
oyster with one of a few grades of oyster.

 _[We built] a scanning detector that would take four images of the oyster as
it fell--just falling under gravity and passing through four separate scanners
at 45 degrees to each other, produces four separate images._

 _We take the four images and they're processed through a dedicated
microprocessor and the algorithms that we use are fairly sophisticated,
because they have to react very fast. And, yes, we produce in a sense a
volumetric calculation_

The machine then chooses which bin to route the oyster to by rotating a
directing piece at the bottom of the drop.

 _Directly below the scanning system we use a server motor which is
effectively the same as you would use in industrial robot and it has a slide
that is re-positioned for each oyster, and is stationary as the oyster is
diverted from the direct fall down into an exit tube. That server motor
rotates and is in its new position within about .03 of a second._

The machine ends up being quite fast, with around a week's worth of work done
in less than a day. The accuracy, at 98%, is also impressive.

 _We have had one machine operating in excess of ten a second. We've limited
it for this particular production machine to a theoretical maximum throughput
of one eight of a second. It works out when an oyster grower is putting them
through at an average of probably three to four a second [which is] about a
thousand dozen an hour, between 800 and 1,000 dozen an hour_

Some diagrams showing what the machine looks like are at [4].

The main differences between this mechanism and the skittle machine is the
extremely quick sorting necessitated by the application (sorting large amounts
of oysters that was previously done by hand) and the reliance on shape
matching rather than colour. I wonder how hard it would be to make a machine
that sorts skittles in a similar way, that is by dropping them down a chute,
analysing and directing them before they reach the bottom rather than the
somewhat slower method evident in the demonstrated machine.

[1] radio interview -
[http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/onairhi...](http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/onairhighlights/oyster-
sorter)

[2] video - [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmdk44_inventions-from-
the-...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmdk44_inventions-from-the-shed-
episode-3_tech)

[3] homepage - <http://www.oystek.com.au/>

[4] drawings

grader - <http://www.oystek.com.au/images/grader_line.jpg>

top down view - <http://www.oystek.com.au/images/grader_line2.JPG>

complete setup - <http://www.oystek.com.au/images/grader_line3.JPG>

------
res0nat0r
An industrial grade version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PNMcNEjdA>

~~~
mercuryrising
After seeing your link, I just watched a half hour of industrial robots.

They're so cool.

Look at how fast this thing moves!!
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5eR0eHknZk>

This is awesome (commentary is kind of boring)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TOotC_Q3sU>

Pick and place machines are pretty cool too, they're like anti-sorting
machines. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nah4BQ9y8IY>

~~~
confluence
You should see the chip shooter robots:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nah4BQ9y8IY>

Humans are so screwed.

~~~
mercuryrising
You should look at the last video I posted :P

------
CKKim
That's very jolly! I like how cleanly constructed it is. On a DIY hacking
project that kind of attention to neatness can make all the difference between
"oh, cool idea" and the feeling of an actual product (even though it's in fact
one of a kind).

I wonder how feasibly the opaque parts could be replaced with transparent ones
and whether that would look cooler or just plain tacky?

------
jivatmanx
I'd like to see something identical to this, but with Marbles. Now THAT would
be something!

The simplest mechanism is would be something like:

1\. Marble goes in, color is scanned and stored. Any future marbles detected
with that color go into the same slot.

Of course there are many problems, mainly because Marbles come in every color
and pattern imaginable. How would you deal with patterns and multi-colors?
What kind of tolerances would you use for more general sorting?

I'd be fascinated to see how someone would deal with these problems. The
problem of multi-color and pattern recognition might have application in many
other fields.

What about actually sorting each marble individually by color shade from
reddest to violetest? That would probably necessitate a storage mechanism.

------
vitalique
Simple, funny machines like this are mesmerizing in their elegant performance
and almost Unix-way determination of doing one thing, but doing it well.

The video also instantly reminds me of another guy having fun with little
colored candies - the one that conducted M&Ms breeding experiments
([http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...](http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081030/OPINION/613186340)).

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te_platt
Sometimes I see other people's ideas and wish I had thought of that. Sometimes
I'm just happy there exist people who love doing this kind of thing.

------
jcurbo
Reminds me of the CubeStormer:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d0LfkIut2M&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d0LfkIut2M&feature=related)

------
xradionut
We did a project of this ilk at the university a couple of decades ago.
Differences were the color detection circuit was a pain-in-the-ass and we used
M&Ms instead of Skittles.

~~~
joezydeco
It's a lot easier now. =)

TAOS had a contest to build an M&M sorter based on their integrated color
sensor. The winning design was nice and simple (and a lot simpler than this
Skittles machine)

[http://candyaddict.com/blog/2005/12/02/how-to-make-an-mm-
sor...](http://candyaddict.com/blog/2005/12/02/how-to-make-an-mm-sorter/)

------
ambiguator
Finally...

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coloneltcb
Red FTW!

