Today I worked on finally creating the part sorter module that I had cadded. The basic premise is that I have two laser cut panels attached with gorail and a stepper motor is mounted in between to the top plate. The stepper motor will have a gear on top of it, which I am still waiting to receive, that rotates the big plate on top which will house the buckets. These modules can then be connected to each other by screwing the next module into the gorail on the top panel. If I want to drop somethign to a the lower level I move the ones above it to a location where the part can just fall through because there is no bucket. This allows me to do about 36 parts in a very compact space for a very low cost.
The next step is to get the gear and attach it to see how it performs and how fast it can fully rotate the big plate. There is an 8:1 gear ratio so it has plenty of torque I just want to make sure it can do a full rotation of the plate in under three seconds. Then once I know this works I can start creating more and start writing an API control scheme for each module.
Devin Willis 