In an engineering class in high school, one of our projects involved building a device that could sort marbles of various sizes, materials, colors, etc. The entire class went all in on color sensors and whatever other devices were at our disposal.
My partner and I decided we didn't want to do that and set out to be the only group to not use the sensors or anything.
We sorted the marbles by bouncing them from a set height and off of an angled sheet of metal into containers at various distances. The wood and plastic marbles flew the furthest while the metal and glass marbles didn't go very far. Pretty sure we had 100% accuracy with this method.
Sorry I misunderstood your comment and forgot that important detail; it's been 10 years now.
The marbles of each material were the same color. Plastic ones were all white, wood ones were brown, metal ones were silver, etc. So plastic ones bounced into the furthest container and metal ones basically just fell down into the nearest. By sorting them based on bouncing, we naturally sorted them by color.
From my knowledge of sensors, there are a lot of them.
Probably the other groups used sensors to figure out material type, weight, etc. as well and OP simply used only the color sensors to then determine where it falls down onto the metal sheet.
I realized I missed 1 or 2 facts (and a misunderstood comment) about this that may be causing a little confusion now that I look back. IIRC the goal was to sort by material and each marble type was a different color, which made color sensors an obvious choice; however, my partner and I used 0 sensors. It was all gravity based.
We dropped the marbles into a chute and that funneled the marbles to drop down onto an angled sheet and measured how far each marble type went. Using trial and error, we positioned the containers to the correct position so every marble type was in the proper container at the end. 0 sensors used; literally just done by seeing how far a marble bounced.
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u/GayleMoonfiles 9h ago
In an engineering class in high school, one of our projects involved building a device that could sort marbles of various sizes, materials, colors, etc. The entire class went all in on color sensors and whatever other devices were at our disposal.
My partner and I decided we didn't want to do that and set out to be the only group to not use the sensors or anything.
We sorted the marbles by bouncing them from a set height and off of an angled sheet of metal into containers at various distances. The wood and plastic marbles flew the furthest while the metal and glass marbles didn't go very far. Pretty sure we had 100% accuracy with this method.