Pill Box Filler

[rgsparber]

Tedious repetitive tasks inspire me. How can I reduce or eliminate them?

Twice a month, I must fill my two pill boxes with many pills. Here is a proof-of-concept tool that makes the job almost tolerable.

Rick

[toyman]

Inquiring minds really want to know the answer to this! :-)

[rgsparber]

It is a bit hard to see, but click on the word Here.

[Karl_H]

Inquiring minds really want to know the answer to this! :-)

The yellow "Here" is a link to a pdf. That is Rick's MO, which makes it easier to save articles for later use.

[mklotz]

"I hope you will suggest ways to improve this tool. Your ideas will be included in this article so we may all benefit. All of us are smarter than any one of us."

You sucked me in again, Rick. I found myself, sponge in hand, standing still in the shower thinking about this. At 85, I also have a seven day pill container to fill every week. I'll offer what I envisioned, not intending as an improvement to your method but rather another way to approach the problem.

Imagine a flat comb-like structure made of seven, evenly spaced, strips of flat material (wood, plastic, cardboard) held together with arches so that pills not caught on the V-shaped ends of these strips can pass between the strips as the strip "comb" sweeps through a cluster of pills scattered on a smooth, flat surface.

The edge of the flat surface lies over the open pill box. As the comb reaches the edge, the pills drop into the seven containers.

The other edges of the surface have low walls arranged into a funnel-like configuration so that, once the pill box is loaded, the surface can be tilted to funnel the remaining pills back into the container from which they came.

Adapting a pill counter, e.g....

https://www.amazon.com/Right-Hand-Pi...s%2C222&sr=8-6

to be the flat surface may save some fabrication time since it's already set up to funnel the excess pills back into their container.

[Karl_H]

I have pills that are large and very small, so I would have to make a couple different channels.

[toyman]

Thanks Rick for pointing that out. Weak eyes and small print made me miss the link! That's my story and I'm sticking to it...

[mklotz]

I have pills that are large and very small, so I would have to make a couple different channels.

If the combs are made using a 3D printer, making several with different size V's should be trivial.

[rgsparber]

Marv,

I did my best to translate your text into a rendering and have put it at the end of my article. How close did I get?

Rick

[Bony]

I think many of us older folk have the same boring job to do regularly. As drugs are usually dispensed in lots of 30 (well at least they are in Australia), I have 5 pill boxes and the chore of filling them is limited to a monthly excercise. This makes it much more tolerable.
It occurs to me that to make the depth of the V in Marv's comb idea adjustable will overcome the difficulty of sorting pills of different sizes, and save having to use several different trays. (Some of mine are oblong shaped which is another problem.)
The best way of picturing my suggestion is to consider two sets of combs, one on top of the other which are allowed to slide over each other. Think of this like the cutting surfaces of hair clippers, the Vs closing together to cut hair.
Why not use this principle of closing Vs to provide adjustment to accommodate sorting pills of different sizes.
That's my suggestion for part of the problem anyway.