Giant tweezers - photo

[nova_robotics]

Here's a bean sorting machine that uses the air jets

Ooohhh. That's a nice unit. Looks light years beyond the stainless steel vibrating trough that was sorting salt crystals years ago.

[fool injector]

Those giant tweezers are sometimes called aquarium tongs. Very useful tools for stuff you can't quite reach or stuff you wouldn't want to touch if you could reach it. Sold by Micro-Mark and not very expensive.

[Toolmaker51]

Maybe they could market vote-counting equipment for 2024.......

[CharlesWaugh]

I chatted with an engineer one time who had built a wheat kernel sorting machine.
The wheat was sorted as it was loaded onto barges - so there was a LOT of wheat to sort one kernel at a time!

They used a color-discriminating electric eye thingy, and for the air jets they simply bolted steel plates on the front of loudspeakers with a tube leading from the plate to the sorting machine.
Transducers (coil-in-a-magnetic gap) are very fast and very controllable for air volume. And they are good for lots of cycles over their lifetime.

He said there were hundreds of lines running one kernel at time through the sorter.

[Toolmaker51]

Not just beans; baked goods are sorted for size, shape, weight and color in similar fashion. Some include X-ray to screen impurities like metal chips, zip ties. Figuratively, all packaged food is inspected in one or combined techniques. Being presorted as Mr. Waugh describes makes subsequent checks even more effective.

[Tooler2]

Here we went from pre-sorted recycling to "dump it all in one bid". I can't imagine how they sort the broken glass and wet paper and other stuff that will inevitably wind up in the stream. My guess is they only grab the bigger visible stuff and everything else goes to landfill.

Here's a bean sorting machine that uses the air jets

impressive machine but I was dying to see the reject bin poured through for another go at selecting the desired colour!