I worked alongside a team in 2014 on a system that classified and counted LEGO. The concept worked but to industrialize the process was pretty challenging. Dealing with parts stuck together was the biggest problem. I love the fact that you went super meta and also made the machine out of LEGO
Agreed. Selling the unit is an option but also selling the design so people can built their own is a good idea too since .. they obviously have legos and want to build stuff (would rather sort than toss). Lego inc. might even be interested!
Are there plans for this? Is there a new version? I'm curious where this has gone in 3 years. Would love to see something like this open sourced (or sold) so the community can build on this.
The LEGO Company should make and sell lego-sorting machines. It should be possible to instruct the machine to sort bricks for a particular lego set, and note which pieces are missing (then automatically create a list of Bricklink).
This is an amazing proof of concept. A very useful machine. Please consider making one to sort nuts, bolts and screws, and get rich selling it to DIYers. I'd be ready to pledge like 100$ if you needed crowdfunding.
Step one: buy a big pile of legos Step two: build a sorting machine Step three: buy another big pile of legos Step four: sort the pile of legos Love it
Wow Daniel, super impressive! I am amazed at the creativity, resourcefulness, and just how cool it was that you did this. I am going to show this to my young son as an example of what he can aspire to with some some creativity and fortitude.
This is fantastic! I've had this idea for awhile but just never had time to dedicate to the project. As a "Phase 2", my plan was to keep an inventory database of the detected bricks that were sorted. Then run this database against all available lego building set instructions. So based on the legos someone owns, they can choose a set of instructions and build to completion whatever the thing is. And on top of this, maybe add thresholds where a user can say they want lego instructions for sets that are a certain percent complete. so if i input 90%, it would find not only lego instructions for sets i can complete in its entirety but lego instructions where i have 90% of the bricks available to complete the set. One last thing, you could have a user community for contributing instruction sets. A person could filter on official only instructions or include user generated instructions as well. Anyway, it is a pipe dream of mine. If you are feeling ambitious, maybe it is something you could add on to your already awesome invention.
This would be insanely useful for sorting parts from new sets. I typically open 10-30 copies of a set at a time and match up the bags so there are about 25-35 unique parts in a batch of 1000+ pieces. Being able to have them sorted at even 95%+ accuracy would be huge. I'd love to help in testing to make this something that can be built and used by lots of people.
It would be the most expensive set you could have. Plus, you did read that it took 2 years to design and developed this, right? So how long do you think it would take to assemble one from a set? Perhaps at least two months? And that would be if you got every moving part/system together right the first time. Great idea though!
Woahh!! Crazy stuff, I like. I've dreamt of a machine like this but in which you could feed in specific model(s) plan(s) so that the sorting can be made to segregate a ton-load of pieces by models. This could be a super tool for dads with kids that had way too much legos over the years and now all the pieces are mixed up in the same bin or part of a weird custom made model 😁 ....just an idea for your next project🤣
I work at a tortilla chips manufacturing company and they use the same technique of a vibrating plate to spread out the chips with before they pass them under a camera to see if there are too browned or burned chips among them.
I'm totally in love with this project :D Great execution! Will surely feature this in my weekly technology report (even though I saw this a little bit late). Good luck with any following projects!
David, first off I love this so much you're a genius. Because the pieces aren't all the way sorted, could you put each bucket (category) back into the machine and let it further sort it? In the end, you could be 100% sorted. Just a thought.
There is even a port of YOLO for the K210 (Search it on Github). That would be hard to optimize as easily as using a proper GPU on an external computer, but a good fun project. If only we had the dataset ;)
@@JonSmirl Yup, it's a fun toy. I have a few Sipeed Maix boards with the K210. Fun to play around with, but optimizing a model for them is a pain compared to throwing the image over the network sometimes.
What criteria do you use to determine which model part goes to which container? - all parts of the same color of whatever shape go to the same container - all parts of the building with the same shape regardless of color goes to the same container - all parts of a lego model such as a helicopter or fire station go to the same container
Can you make the training data available want to make a similar project but I don't really understand how you made the images or what AI you are using from the TensorFlow package.
Hello, Daniel. My name is Evgeny and I am owner of one of the largest used-lego-toy-parts stores on Bricklink. I am really interesting in such sorting machine. How can I contact you for discuss?
I would think that there is a much cheaper and faster way to create one of these machines opposed to doing it in lego. 3d printing parts would be cheaper, but I don't know if there's a design for that. However, you can always talk to daniel about it
Hi Daniel. Do you haev something where people can build this or are you selling plans? I'm asking because our community church puts on a lego event each year for a thing called KIDS games. WE have about TEN 20 gallon buckets of legos and we are in need of a sorter. Any possible help here you can provide would be great.
It's trained on 3D models. So do you really think it's feasible to make a 3D model for every single type of plastic bottle, every color, every brand, every shape, not to mention variations of such bottles, whether they be dented, malformed, or otherwise misshapen?
I'm dreaming of the day when I can select a brick in an app on my phone, point the camera to a pile of Lego and it finds and highlights the brick on my screen. Sort of like the real time text translation, but then for finding Lego bricks.
Daniel, have you continued to use this machine or made improvements to it? There definitely needs to be an updated video to this (or additional article updates), preferably with more information on the details of its operation.
I check up on the progress of this every few years. It would be great if some day there was a machine -- like a coinstar -- i could dump buckets of legos into for sorting! I would pay good money for that, though with so many different shapes and colors, I suppose it would be very difficult, as you demonstrate here. You would also have trouble with dust and other random junk that seems to build in lego storage containers over time. Also, where would it sort it into? I think perhaps a good business model would be to ask someone to ship you a box and then you would provide a storage container with many compartments. That would allow you to keep it relatively small scale until you had the capital to build more sorting machines.
Can you put this on Lego Ideas, i know it would never get made but maybe its a way to give lego wake up call of what AFOLs really want . less time sorting and more time building !
Hey, Do you by any change plan to make your code available? I love this idea and I would like to try to give my own spin at it (possibly looking at how the sorting and storing could be done more efficiently). But my coding experience isn't that strong so it would help me to have a jump-off point.
I am interested in buying a Lego sorting machine. Have you come across any for sale? Or do you sell a machine that can do that for me. Our STEM school have so many Legos
Do you plan on releasing/selling the dataset/code? I know it took you a lot of work, but that'd be the thing that be the most fun for AI experimentation. I'd love to play around with this, even if it's just to help crowdsource data verification.
Dude, this is amazing. Have you considered to use a Google Coral edge-processor to make it fully autarg? Basically a the Google Coral can infer Neural Networks really fast, and can be connected as a dongle to raspberry pi.
This is definitely the optimal solution, but a much easier on to build would be one that can identify each piece by weight and then shape if pieces share a weight. I actually might be able to build my version at home and not need a crazy budget nor a crazy time investment.
Daniel - can you comment as to how you decided on the final buckets / taxonomy? Like, is it all gears in one bucket, and then simple blocks? I'd love to see more on that, if you do a followup video. Thank you!
I am also slowly becoming obsessed with the sorting machine for Legos.my idea was also to use artificial intelligence and mission learning to differentiate Legos from each other. I think this is the only way. I was thinking in my mind is smaller kind of machine can achieve this, but seeing your videos made me realize that it will be really difficult to create such a machine in a smaller scale. Do you still work on this project because I see that it is three years old now?
I wonder how it handles non-Lego; either knock-off bricks or random objects. Also the feeder system requires that all the bricks be disconnected from each other inside the hopper. Would stuck together bricks be treated like a never before seen piece type?
Please consider a kickstarter or something, or selling plans and the software? This is amazing
i will eventualy do one that i will sell and it will handle as many different category as you want without more motor
@@minlrgo pls contact me
@@iRONcss do you have an email or discord
I’d like to invest if you need any funding. I’d also like to own 1. Please feel free to reach out!
@@csullivan626 are you speaking to me ? or to andrew or else ?
I worked alongside a team in 2014 on a system that classified and counted LEGO. The concept worked but to industrialize the process was pretty challenging. Dealing with parts stuck together was the biggest problem. I love the fact that you went super meta and also made the machine out of LEGO
Agreed. Selling the unit is an option but also selling the design so people can built their own is a good idea too since .. they obviously have legos and want to build stuff (would rather sort than toss). Lego inc. might even be interested!
Fantastic work, Daniel. Keep it up!
Instablaster.
Are there plans for this? Is there a new version? I'm curious where this has gone in 3 years. Would love to see something like this open sourced (or sold) so the community can build on this.
The LEGO Company should make and sell lego-sorting machines. It should be possible to instruct the machine to sort bricks for a particular lego set, and note which pieces are missing (then automatically create a list of Bricklink).
LEGO now have these and will buy your old LEGO. Sad day for Bricklink sellers!
This is an amazing proof of concept. A very useful machine.
Please consider making one to sort nuts, bolts and screws, and get rich selling it to DIYers.
I'd be ready to pledge like 100$ if you needed crowdfunding.
Step one: buy a big pile of legos
Step two: build a sorting machine
Step three: buy another big pile of legos
Step four: sort the pile of legos
Love it
I'm so glad someone brought this idea to life. It is incredible what you have created and I can't wait to see whatever you do next!
Great project and execution. Bringing the best of LEGO and engineering together in a useful way!
Dude this is amazing and you are amazing, someone get this man some views
Wow Daniel, super impressive! I am amazed at the creativity, resourcefulness, and just how cool it was that you did this. I am going to show this to my young son as an example of what he can aspire to with some some creativity and fortitude.
This is fantastic! I've had this idea for awhile but just never had time to dedicate to the project.
As a "Phase 2", my plan was to keep an inventory database of the detected bricks that were sorted. Then run this database against all available lego building set instructions. So based on the legos someone owns, they can choose a set of instructions and build to completion whatever the thing is.
And on top of this, maybe add thresholds where a user can say they want lego instructions for sets that are a certain percent complete. so if i input 90%, it would find not only lego instructions for sets i can complete in its entirety but lego instructions where i have 90% of the bricks available to complete the set.
One last thing, you could have a user community for contributing instruction sets. A person could filter on official only instructions or include user generated instructions as well.
Anyway, it is a pipe dream of mine. If you are feeling ambitious, maybe it is something you could add on to your already awesome invention.
That technology already exists. Take a look at the "build" section of rebrickable.com/build/
Nice! This video made it on to a news website here in The Netherlands!
Lol. Same. Just got it into my Google feed
Welke als ik vragen mag?
nu.nl
www.nu.nl/277861/video/slimme-lego-machine-herkent-en-sorteert-lego-stenen.html
Nog niet gelezen, ga nu bekijken!
That's incredible. Well done!
This would be insanely useful for sorting parts from new sets. I typically open 10-30 copies of a set at a time and match up the bags so there are about 25-35 unique parts in a batch of 1000+ pieces. Being able to have them sorted at even 95%+ accuracy would be huge. I'd love to help in testing to make this something that can be built and used by lots of people.
Why do you open 25-35 sets at a time? How had it been 3 years and no one questioned this?
It would be nice to see this as an official LEGO set, I would definitely buy it !
It would be the most expensive set you could have. Plus, you did read that it took 2 years to design and developed this, right? So how long do you think it would take to assemble one from a set? Perhaps at least two months? And that would be if you got every moving part/system together right the first time.
Great idea though!
Woahh!! Crazy stuff, I like. I've dreamt of a machine like this but in which you could feed in specific model(s) plan(s) so that the sorting can be made to segregate a ton-load of pieces by models. This could be a super tool for dads with kids that had way too much legos over the years and now all the pieces are mixed up in the same bin or part of a weird custom made model 😁 ....just an idea for your next project🤣
shut up and take my money!!
How much for it? I’m serious.
Me too~^^
Sign me up
I also take one
About a grand i bet.
Well he said it’s made from over 10,000 pieces. So in addition to the computer, I’d say around $2,000-2,500
I work at a tortilla chips manufacturing company and they use the same technique of a vibrating plate to spread out the chips with before they pass them under a camera to see if there are too browned or burned chips among them.
Well now you can input random variable images into the neural net and increase its efficiency!
We want instructions!
I'm totally in love with this project :D Great execution! Will surely feature this in my weekly technology report (even though I saw this a little bit late). Good luck with any following projects!
Awsome project! Will you ever make any of the code/dataset public? 😊 I think the benefits would be great since more people could keep improving both 😁
PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEAASSSSE SELL THIS AND MAKE A COMPANY
@Daniel West. can you share the how you builded the green shaker part?
私も興味があります。ぜひ教えてください
amazing. Been dreaming up something along these lines for years. Bravo on getting it done!
David, first off I love this so much you're a genius. Because the pieces aren't all the way sorted, could you put each bucket (category) back into the machine and let it further sort it? In the end, you could be 100% sorted. Just a thought.
Also, your name isn't David that's a fun mistake, so sorry
A Kendryte K210 Maix board (~$20) would be about 100x faster than the PI for the image recognition task. You can load tensorflow models onto it.
There is even a port of YOLO for the K210 (Search it on Github). That would be hard to optimize as easily as using a proper GPU on an external computer, but a good fun project.
If only we had the dataset ;)
@@nikkelitous s3.cn-north-1.amazonaws.com.cn/dl.kendryte.com/documents/kendryte_datasheet_20181011163248_en.pdf
@@JonSmirl Yup, it's a fun toy. I have a few Sipeed Maix boards with the K210. Fun to play around with, but optimizing a model for them is a pain compared to throwing the image over the network sometimes.
What criteria do you use to determine which model part goes to which container?
- all parts of the same color of whatever shape go to the same container
- all parts of the building with the same shape regardless of color
goes to the same container
- all parts of a lego model such as a helicopter or fire station go to the same container
It's arbitrary, and it would take a minimal point of code to change it to work like any of those options
Please sell this plans and software, I need this 😂!
We could use that at Gears 2 Robots! So much time is spent sorting Lego Education kits after summer camps and classes!
Hi Daniel, is there any Chance to get the Code/Software? Many thx.
Can you make the training data available want to make a similar project but I don't really understand how you made the images or what AI you are using from the TensorFlow package.
Hello Daniel. Is it possible to use your machine ? I am based in France and my son has about 40 lego boxes.
My son wants to start a brick business. How do I get a machine like this for him?
Hello, Daniel. My name is Evgeny and I am owner of one of the largest used-lego-toy-parts stores on Bricklink. I am really interesting in such sorting machine. How can I contact you for discuss?
Someone needs to sort alot of bricks
yeah and im the Executive Lego sorter at Lego university.
I would think that there is a much cheaper and faster way to create one of these machines opposed to doing it in lego. 3d printing parts would be cheaper, but I don't know if there's a design for that. However, you can always talk to daniel about it
Евгений Сусеков He has a Twitter link in the description
Hi Daniel. Do you haev something where people can build this or are you selling plans? I'm asking because our community church puts on a lego event each year for a thing called KIDS games. WE have about TEN 20 gallon buckets of legos and we are in need of a sorter.
Any possible help here you can provide would be great.
Hey this is great... You just discovered how to sort plastic bottles into the right plastic groups for recycling.
zebramax3 and, how many % are actually really recycled and not burned?
It's trained on 3D models. So do you really think it's feasible to make a 3D model for every single type of plastic bottle, every color, every brand, every shape, not to mention variations of such bottles, whether they be dented, malformed, or otherwise misshapen?
@Roman Hauksson-Neill For the non-popular ones, you can just sell it to the next guy with a better sorter. :-)
This is incredible!! Would you do a video on the 18 categories you use? I've been trying to find a good way to organize bricks.
How much to buy it
Hard work, passion, creativity, technology, ART!
I'm dreaming of the day when I can select a brick in an app on my phone, point the camera to a pile of Lego and it finds and highlights the brick on my screen.
Sort of like the real time text translation, but then for finding Lego bricks.
This is what Bricklink Shop owners are waiting for xD
Great work! How accurate was the classification?
Underrated ngl, great
Coolest thing Ive seen all week (month??)!!
u are very smart, I have had ideas of a machine like this myself, but never understood how the computer would recognize a part
Daniel, have you continued to use this machine or made improvements to it? There definitely needs to be an updated video to this (or additional article updates), preferably with more information on the details of its operation.
Very cool project, have been following along on Twitter. Good job 😎
nice machine did you have some instructions?
Please tell me you sell the plans?
Can you make this as a lego set
Everyone need this set
wooow... Daniel you made incredible job. I love spend time with brick but sorting for long time is exhausting :D
Any word on if this available?
I check up on the progress of this every few years. It would be great if some day there was a machine -- like a coinstar -- i could dump buckets of legos into for sorting! I would pay good money for that, though with so many different shapes and colors, I suppose it would be very difficult, as you demonstrate here. You would also have trouble with dust and other random junk that seems to build in lego storage containers over time. Also, where would it sort it into? I think perhaps a good business model would be to ask someone to ship you a box and then you would provide a storage container with many compartments. That would allow you to keep it relatively small scale until you had the capital to build more sorting machines.
How is the project going?
Can you put this on Lego Ideas, i know it would never get made but maybe its a way to give lego wake up call of what AFOLs really want . less time sorting and more time building !
My only question is: how can one find the parts necessary to build this awesome device, if they haven’t been sorted first?
Very impressive, and will help so many with other similar, and less similar projects! ❤
Wuao 2 años, excelente amigo, saludos desde Perú 🇵🇪
Can I apply for the code and assembly plan?
Hey, Do you by any change plan to make your code available? I love this idea and I would like to try to give my own spin at it (possibly looking at how the sorting and storing could be done more efficiently). But my coding experience isn't that strong so it would help me to have a jump-off point.
why did you use the 2 green plates and not a conveyer belt?
I am interested in buying a Lego sorting machine. Have you come across any for sale? Or do you sell a machine that can do that for me. Our STEM school have so many Legos
This is an amazing project. Well done.
Awesome man... Nice Work
Could it sort by color if you wanted
You are a genius, absolutely amazing work.
If i would like one of these for my own, how could i get one? And what would be the price card?
I have made a sorting machine to clasify all my bricks, but I use all of them to make the machine. So now I have nothing to clasify.
Do you plan on releasing/selling the dataset/code? I know it took you a lot of work, but that'd be the thing that be the most fun for AI experimentation. I'd love to play around with this, even if it's just to help crowdsource data verification.
lego should sell this as a set. this wonderful. Possible to put the code on github?
I cant wait to see what you do next
:) Cheers
So cool! i saw this when i was at the Raspberry Pi website.
Cool design
This is soooo freakin cool!
Your opening statement is wrong. Everyone does not hate sorting Lego. I find it quite relaxing. Nevertheless, your build is amazing. Well done.
"Everyone hates sorting LEGO"
Speak for yourself, I LOVE sorting LEGO.
how much?
Dude, this is amazing. Have you considered to use a Google Coral edge-processor to make it fully autarg? Basically a the Google Coral can infer Neural Networks really fast, and can be connected as a dongle to raspberry pi.
Today it's really hard to find a coral sold somewhere anymore 😭
Dang dude that is insane, I’d lose my mind building that thing you. are. truly insane! :)
Next challenge: to build a lego machine for sorting out the problems in my life, and solving them
I need that one too.
This is definitely the optimal solution, but a much easier on to build would be one that can identify each piece by weight and then shape if pieces share a weight. I actually might be able to build my version at home and not need a crazy budget nor a crazy time investment.
Yes, weighing the parts would be very helpful (akiyuky does that in his machine) but it is hard to weight parts and maintain a good speed
Is there any chance you will make a commercial model?
Daniel - can you comment as to how you decided on the final buckets / taxonomy? Like, is it all gears in one bucket, and then simple blocks? I'd love to see more on that, if you do a followup video. Thank you!
Great job Daniel!
Any updates on this, because I would buy this to have in my house
Wow. You win RUclips this week!
This is awesome!
Fun fact: Once you build this machine you won't have any more Lego bricks to sort 🤣
Imagine slowly deconstructing the machine and letting it sort itself lol
Patently this could sort in to bricks/ stud numbers and color?
Designing, building, prototyping, programming, bugfixing, and improving it is still probably faster than doing it manually.
I have 3 bins of legos and not sorted I really want one
wow! great job!
I am also slowly becoming obsessed with the sorting machine for Legos.my idea was also to use artificial intelligence and mission learning to differentiate Legos from each other. I think this is the only way. I was thinking in my mind is smaller kind of machine can achieve this, but seeing your videos made me realize that it will be really difficult to create such a machine in a smaller scale. Do you still work on this project because I see that it is three years old now?
I created an equivalent machine which divides into 6 without image recognition. How do parts fall in the rows below ?
Tell us more
I cannot believe this guy stopped making videos after this one. I hope that is because his focusing on the production of this amazing machine.
I wonder how it handles non-Lego; either knock-off bricks or random objects. Also the feeder system requires that all the bricks be disconnected from each other inside the hopper. Would stuck together bricks be treated like a never before seen piece type?
How does the vibrating mechanism work?
Can you please send me the plans for your lego sorting machine?
Very cool! Looking forward to the other video!