[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi Lego Sorter
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Raspberry Pi Lego Sorter
Author : justin66
Score : 102 points
Date : 2021-01-19 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raspberrypi.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raspberrypi.org)
| celticninja wrote:
| can i rent it?
| junga wrote:
| Lego Sorter as a Service coming soon!
| zwieback wrote:
| Very cool. The vibration feeder reminds me of the time when I was
| building assembly lines, those feeders were always tricky to get
| right, even when feeding only a single type of part. We had bowl
| feeders, which feed and singulate simultaneously but that would
| be hard to do in Lego and impossible for multiple unknown part
| varieties.
| the-dude wrote:
| This can't be right : it claims the worlds first.
|
| I distinctly remember a Lego sorter here on HN, from one of our
| very own.
|
| edit, here we go : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889
| justin66 wrote:
| I had the same thought, that I'd seen one before. Thanks.
| hehehaha wrote:
| Watch the video. He mentions it by name.
| the-dude wrote:
| Ahh, I see. Thanks for the pointer. I was too quick to
| dismiss, however a link to the one from @jacquesm does not
| hurt this thread.
| hehehaha wrote:
| I agree with you!
| paulkrush wrote:
| In reality I think a Lego(or screw, or x) finding tool on a phone
| would find a 1000x more users vs a sorting machine. It's also a
| much harder problem.
| paulkrush wrote:
| This is cool. I didn't know it was possible to use CAD now to
| build the network(correctly)!
|
| If you did not have the CAD files and you were only searching for
| specific parts you can still build a network that is trained from
| a single Lego by varying lighting angles and camera pose and
| spatially correlating that part to itself. If there is huge
| variation in part types you might also need to infer with known
| lighting angles and camera angles as well. I posted a demo on
| this 4 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHm4Oz2sml8
|
| BTW: If you know of other references to what I just described I
| would love to see them!
|
| Over the holidays I built a $10 cable robot to get different
| cameras poses for this reason: https://github.com/GemHunt/cable-
| robot
| salamanderman wrote:
| He does say that the simulated images don't really work. He had
| to supplement the simulated images with 100k manually labelled
| images. https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-created-
| over-100-000-la...
| kube-system wrote:
| I could see this kind of tech being very useful for the second-
| hand retail market, lego or otherwise.
| frettchen wrote:
| > Raspberry Pi is at the heart of this AI-powered, automated
| sorting machine that is capable of recognising and sorting any
| LEGO brick.
|
| > ...wirelessly sends to a more powerful computer able to run the
| neural network that classifies the parts.
|
| "The heart" may be a strong term - the eyes and hands, maybe, but
| the brain, at least, appears to be separate.
|
| Still a very cool project.
| showerst wrote:
| I wonder if they could do that onboard with a jetson nano.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I'm surprised an RPI can't be optimized to run the CNN
| classifier. It has up to 8 GB of ram and a pretty decent
| integrated GPU.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| The problem is its GPU was always poorly documented or not at
| all since Broadcom considered it proprietary IP and never
| provided any detailed low-level documentation.
| villgax wrote:
| Good effort but the editors could just google once in a while,
|
| Jacques did it years ago https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-
| metric-tons-of-lego/
| cbg0 wrote:
| This is actually mentioned in the video.
| smartbit wrote:
| Date: Dec 3, 2019
|
| Please update the title and append "(2019)"
| hehehaha wrote:
| I think it would be cool if Lego can install sorting machines in
| Lego stores. What a great way to increase foot traffic.
| frettchen wrote:
| I miss when stores in malls and the like would have weird
| contraptions of that sort (mobiles, pendulums, ball/marble race
| tracks, etc.) to catch your eye.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I like the model railways in some large stations in Europe.
|
| For example, here's the one at Copenhagen Main Station:
|
| https://en.hovedbanen.dk/currency-services/model-train-
| track...
| zwieback wrote:
| Me too. However, I'm glad I never used one of those X-ray
| machines they had in shoe stores of the past:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| How many legos do you have to have to build it and still have
| enough left over that you need a machine to sort through them?
| codefreakxff wrote:
| This isn't for sorting 2-3 left over pieces from built sets.
| This is for sorting bulk boxes of bricks like you might have
| after your kids play with their sets and dump everything into a
| big pile
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| I'm not against it as much as in aww because the device
| itself is made of A LOT of legos, so not only do you have a
| lot of legos from building the sorting device but then you
| have a lot of legos for the sorting device to be useful.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think people buy bulk, mixed Lego on Ebay, separate it,
| and resell it in neat lots for a profit.
| hanief wrote:
| Here's a million dollar idea for LEGO Group (or any third party):
| make and sell a LEGO sorting machine. It should be portable
| enough, and flexible enough for wide ranging of application. I
| think it can sell loads of them.
| hehehaha wrote:
| Or just have them in Lego stores. People come and hand off
| their buckets. It sorts and bags them. Emails you the inventory
| which you can upload to bricklink to purchase missing pieces,
| etc. It's really a great solution and gets people in the
| stores.
|
| And considering the time it saves for people it's more than a
| million-dollar idea.
| amelius wrote:
| LEGO bricks are an easy thing to train using CNNs because there
| are no outliers. Unless of course the machine can recognize "non-
| LEGO" bits and put them in a separate bin.
| hehehaha wrote:
| I really like the part where you can train the ML models using
| 3D models. So you can train it indefinitely. That's the meat of
| this project imo.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but the point is that it breaks when you have different
| stuff between your LEGO. Classifiers that can handle
| anomalies are a lot more difficult to train.
|
| Most DL-based classification libraries skip over this fact.
| hehehaha wrote:
| Couldn't you randomly insert common objects to 3D renders?
| salamanderman wrote:
| Someone posted a link to a prior lego sorter, and that article
| pointed out that there can be outliers because of the
| prevalence of knockoff and lego-compatible pieces.
| https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/
| apples_oranges wrote:
| I like watching YT videos of machinery in factories. There's some
| cool stuff there that works just like that sorting machine. Also
| it's very interesting to see how raw materials get changed,
| folded, molded, printed etc. until they are part of something
| else. Doesn't matter if it's a pencil, a poster or an nvidia
| graphics card..
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > or an nvidia graphics card
|
| The thing I find most impressive is how the PCB assembly
| service manages to populate the PCB with hundreds of different
| parts of which some are barely larger than a corn of sand on a
| beach, and that not a single one ends up misplaced or mis-
| aligned after the reflow process.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Pick and place robots for electronics parts are mesmerizing
| to watch in operation. They move so fast it is almost
| impossible to see the actual placement of a part start-to-
| finish, you see parts 'appear'.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G7pUqRZjU8
|
| 10 parts per second is pretty common now.
| amelius wrote:
| Next: a machine that can put together LEGO bricks according to
| the assembly instructions?
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