Big Electrically Actuated DC Sorter (BEADS) for Beads

By Jonas E. Wenberg, Felix C. Heyerdahl

1) Big Electrical Actuated DC Sorter (BEADS) for Beads

Often times when you are creating something with beads, particularly if you are a child, you have by accident or on purpose mixed all your beads in one big box, or just mixed some of them in different containers. This is particularly frustrating for older beaders who usually want to make some more structured art, like this Bod?/Glimt logo. You might also get a request from an angry child who desperatly want the last 16 pink beads from a box of 15 000 different beads. Then you will want our Big Electrical Actuated DC Sorter (BEADS) for beads, out mid december 2025 (retail price low, heavily subsidized by the university of Oslo).

2) Goals

The goal of this project is to design a Sorting machine that is able to sort pearls rapidly and with great accuracy.

We plan to optimize the accuracy of the colour recognition and sorting as well as the speed at which the sorter can operate.

We were inspired by two quite different bead sorting machines^1, and will draw inspiration from both in our attempt at designing an fast and accurate bead sorter. We are leaning towards a hopper design akin to ^2 which should allow for simpler control and possibly higher speeds while the compact nature of the sorter in ^1 might be advantagious.

3) Sketch

The bead sorter consists of 3 main parts, a hopper that ensures beads arrive at a manageable rate, colour recognition unit which should idealy be able to detect colour while the beads are moving or alternatively hold them still long enough for sorting. The final part is the sorter itself which will receive colour commands and direct the beads into correct bins.

We will attempt to optimize the speed at which the machine can send send beads,detect colour and sort it while also achieving a near perfect accuracy by utilizing simple machine learning for bead and colour recognition, and sorting.

4) Bill of materials (BOMs)

(will be updated later today)

5) Plan