The skittle starts by someone putting the skittle inside of the funnel. It doesn't fall because of a wheel that is at the bottom of the funnel. The wheel is controlled by a servo, and it has a single hole in it for the skittle to fall through. The skittle will fall through the hole, and the servo turns the wheel 90 degrees to guide the skittle toward a color sensor. The color sensor will detect a color, and will change the angle of another servo which is connected to a ramp. The servo will change its angle to match the color and the wheel will turn another 90 degrees. After this, the skittle will fall through the floor which will fall onto the ramp. Then the skittle will fall down the ramp into a certain bin.
In the first image, this sets the angle of the first servo to 180 to catch the servo, then sets the angle to 90 to position the skittle below the color sensor.
In the second image, the servo repositions the wheel to 0 degrees after detecting the color to drop the skittle into the bin.
This detects and shows the color that the color sensor gets
This repositions the angle of the ramp of the second servo for each color. To know what angle the ramp should go to, if/else statements are used from the color sensors.
This project has been a lot more interactive than other projects that I have done. It involves multiple aspects such as programming as well as physical design while most projects have been online. One challenge that I have had to overcome was the design of the ramp. We had to go through multiple iterations of the ramp because of the compact design of the skittle sorter we chose. The ramp would either get stuck on the top layers of the box, or the skittles wouldn't fall onto the ramp. I am the most proud of the neat design of the skittle sorter.