Colour sortex machine circuit design

[DrG]

I grabbed a picture just before it captured a nut.
View attachment 119356
The next frame the nut is sucked into a pipe.

Watch the video from 148 to 149 the head moves forward. (when there is only one nut to grab)

Yep...and the cameras are well before the picker (red arrow) I think.

 

[ronsimpson]

Yep...and the cameras are well before the picker (red arrow) I think.

I was just trying to get a good picture of that area. The light is very bright. There must be a reason. We once used a line camera for a job like this. 100x1 camera. The price of cameras are so low I would use a "normal" camera. Even if the software was set up to do 1000x1 camera I would use a normal camera and just study one line of pixels.

 

[DrG]

I was just trying to get a good picture of that area. The light is very bright. There must be a reason. We once used a line camera for a job like this. 100x1 camera. The price of cameras are so low I would use a "normal" camera. Even if the software was set up to do 1000x1 camera I would use a normal camera and just study one line of pixels.

The bright light reminds me of a scanner. I think they could be using several kinds of imaging. It really is pretty cool.

 

[ronsimpson]

Looks just like the scanner in my printer.

 

[shortbus=]

If I am seeing correctly, in the video it looks like they are sucking the bad almonds up through that hose...to be used in something else I suppose.

What do you think that machine costs? Over 100K?

That maybe how they're doing it in that video, what I was trying to say was, that isn't how industry does it, the video your talking about is way too slow, you might as well have a human sitting there doing it. It is more of a 'picker' than a sorter. Look at how the companies making the sorters do it , with air jets at much higher speed.

 

[ronsimpson]

From the video: (just a still picture)

This looks good. The air jets do not have to be in a row, "128 in a line" but could be 32 in 4 rows offset to make 128 wide.
The software will have to be made very fast. The camera is maybe 1-2 inches above the jets. You will not have to think about belt speed or variations in belt speed.

 

[BobW]

I worked on the automation controls in a pea processing plant many years ago. They had several colour sorters for separating out mis-coloured peas. It was a bit simpler technology than the Bühler machine, but it had to process in the tonnes/hour range, so it was considerably faster. The flow of peas was split into one of 128 (or maybe 256) parallel narrow chutes, and instead of a camera, there was a simple colour discriminating photosensor in each chute that would trigger the puff of air to push the rejects into a side chute. It was quite impressive to watch in operation, especially when separating a 50:50 mix of green and yellow peas that, ahem, someone, had accidentally put into the same storage bin.

 

[shortbus=]

There was an eposode of "How it's Made" on yesterday (7/28/19) about this. After going through all of the optical sorters, conveyor "pickers", the last thing before packaging was a group of humans picking out the ones the machines missed! Think it was the Blue Diamond almond plant.