
Sorting 2 Tons of Lego (2017) - NicoJuicy
http://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-lego-many-questions-and-this-is-what-the-result-looks-like/
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prawn
1-2 years ago, I commented on HN in a random Lego thread and Jacques sent my
son (we're in Australia) some bulk Technic pieces. As with all Lego, they've
been played with over and over and I always remember that generosity.

Thanks Jacques.

~~~
bigiain
I bought 2kg from Jacques, also delivered to Australia, back in (searches
email) Aug 2017.

It has brought much joy to various small people (and me...)

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sverhagen
The pictures at the end are so satisfying to see. I have a four year old and
their Lego is a constant throwback to good times.

~~~
jacquesm
Judging by your name you are in NL? If so come on over one of these days and
I'll be happy to give you some.

~~~
sverhagen
Name is Dutch, but I live in Portland, Oregon, now. Thanks for the offer, I'm
sure your Legos will find a good home, though!

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rdtwo
Can you sort them with enough detail that you can reassemble existing sets?
That’s probably the way to go for adding significant value back to the pieces

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, absolutely.

The workflow would be: sort about 10% of the pieces in a test, use that to
determine which sets are present based on the rare pieces, then pull those out
of the bulk in one pass, it can do 12 sets in one go. Then you do it all over
again until there is no more left.

~~~
ant6n
Given a large set of unsorted lego pieces, and a list of possible lego sets
with associated dollars values:

Do a single pass to identify/scan all the pieces. Then based on that, divide
those into sets such that the associated dollar values are maximized and such
that the number of sets is minimized.

Then select the 11 most valuable of the sets and use the sorting machine to
sort these out, all the remaining legos go in the 12 set. Repeat.

Simple ;D

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jacquesm
Crazy how often this has been posted to HN.

~~~
NicoJuicy
I think it's one of the 2 examples where Machine Learning actually was seen
usefull as DIY-project.

The other one is with a cucumber farm:
[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-
cu...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-cucumber-
farmer-is-using-deep-learning-and-tensorflow)

Fyi: The real reason why i posted it, is that suddenly your RSS feeds on your
website work again i suppose :P

So all your items on your blog are suddenly in my list again :)

That and ... it's an awesome story :p

~~~
jacquesm
> The real reason why i posted it, is that suddenly your RSS feeds on your
> website work again i suppose :P

I fixed a minor bug in my Hugo setup and posted a new article, that's probably
the reason why that changed. Now I still need to go fix the images on older
posts. No rest for the wicked!

My current project also has ML in it; music, MIDI, programming, what's not to
like :)?

I'm very much unsure about whether or not I will be able to get it to work
though, I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Ahhh, yes. It could be that the URL or Unique Id changed of the feed.

No worries for the images though, as i'm not using that ( but i could)

[http://handlr.sapico.me/](http://handlr.sapico.me/) :p

~~~
bigiain
Can confirm, Feedly handed me a bunch of older posts as unread along with the
"Briefcase" on earlier today...

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ALittleLight
How do you disassemble the Lego when they are first acquired? My guess is
that, buying bulk Lego, some of them will already be snapped together. Is that
a manual first step, or do you have a technique to separate them
automatically?

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jacquesm
That's an unsolved problem. You'd be surprised how hard it is to separate
certain parts from each other. But the first bulk sorting step usually takes
care of picking out the larger assemblies and there is a class 'assembly'
which gets picked out all by itself by the machine. That at least allows you
to concentrate on the parts that are still stuck together.

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wizzard
Can the machine detect three identical plates stuck together? Just curious.

My most hated parts to separate are a flat dot on top of a regular dot. Second
runner-up is the 1x1 plate on top of a dot, which is common in the Minecraft
sets. I'd pay for a machine just to separate these for me!

~~~
jacquesm
Depending on the viewing angle: yes. If the part should land particularly
unfavorably on the belt then there is a small chance that it would not be
seen.

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Theodores
The sorting is colour first for me. Colour is the resource that matters, the
limiting factor to a model. Therefore I find it amusing that this is not the
primary consideration.

As a child I found that the models made by my sister and myself were in a
different league to those of the other kids because of this aspect of colour.
We could use every brick in the box to build a townscape but nothing in the
scene would be built without attention to the colours. Some other house or
building might have to be part demolished to get the right colour bricks, it
came down to resource optimisation. Those other kids that didn't have the
colours sorted out were beginner level, they had worked out the bricks stick
together but hadn't worked out that colours matter, as they do with the Lego
sets, which are never jumble sale coloured with random bricks everywhere.
There always has to be this aspect of taste to the colours.

Right now I do have a manually sorted selection of bricks. They are for my
niece when she is old enough to move on from Duplo. We have sorted the bricks
by colour and then by size. The challenge to this has also involved washing
them with the sorting being by colour and then size granularity. There are
specials such as the flowers and other vegetation, doors/windows and so forth.
In theory my niece will be able to get the bigger blocks first and then the
specialised fiddly piece, e.g. 1x tiles, can come along later.

There have been other decisions made, for instance the mini-figures have been
broken down to their component parts so that there is no knowing what they
were originally. There are just lots of tops/bottoms/heads and hairdos.

We are short of roof parts. But who is to know if my niece would want to be
making the town scene that was the de-facto model that my sister and myself
would want to make?

I also think too many specialist brick shapes can be bad for the imagination,
so I hope the staggered release of basic blocks to then move on to the smaller
pieces will help with this aspect of creative possibilities for my niece. My
niece is a single child so won't have resource wars with a sibling, which is a
bit sad.

There are many potential customers, including those too old for LEGO (not that
you can ever be too old for it), I hope my 'colour first' pointers help.

~~~
jacquesm
Sorting color is problematic. Yes, it is an easy first sort step with
relatively limited number of output bins. But once sorted by color it becomes
10 times at least harder to pick out a shape. Anybody that I know that has
sorted Lego in quantity first goes for that because it seems so obvious, and
then after a while all of them revert.

Think about it: pick the 2x4 brick in red from a pile of 2x4 bricks in various
colors vs pick the 2x4 brick in red from a pile of red bricks in various
shapes. The first you can do in a heartbeat, the second will take _much_
longer, and it is also much harder to determine that a piece isn't there in
the first place.

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gibi555
I think shipping to Russia will be very expensive for me. Also, the difference
in exchange rates will play a big role. I apologize for the bad English. I am
writing using Google translator

~~~
jacquesm
If you're ever in the neighborhood or know someone who travels to NL then let
me know.

~~~
gibi555
unfortunately I can only dream of visiting you)) for a month of work we are
paid 355 euros. but if someone from my friends goes, I will inform you! it's
so interesting to communicate with someone from another country)), albeit with
the help of Google translator

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lnsru
The machine is impressive. It’s so nice to see hardware project here.

2 tons LEGO has eBay Kleinanzeigen value of €20k+ if one sells them in packets
of 5 kg. My problem in LEGO building is simple: I don’t have enough rare
parts. These can be substituted with improvised modules, but when set needs
3-5 of them it’s not buildable anymore. Having many improvised modules break
original plan and the result sometimes isn’t satisfactory anymore.

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StavrosK
This project is fantastic, both the goal and the execution really appeals to
me. It screams hacker/maker, good job.

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lucb1e
(2017)

