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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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🤣
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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!
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'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.
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 !
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why do you not use one of the LEGO CAD programs for training? That way you can use 3D models with all possible cameras and lighting instead of relying on 2D photographs.
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?
This would be a fantastic thing to get out to the lego lovers. I am a design and technology teacher with years of experience in sorts of things tech, design, CAD/CAM and even some machine eye stuff, if you'd like some support with the process. I imagine there would be lots of others keen to help you realise your ideas. Just shout out and get a team together. Delegate jobs and lets make this happen.
I'm curious if you will be able to link to resulting brick inventory to the bricklink database, so you instantly can see what sets the lot comprises of (and what stones are missing). Next step would be to sort the bricks straight into bins, dedicated to a single set.
Unfortunately the whole being able to recognize so many parts is thwarted by only separating it into 18 buckets. You need a little over 50 buckets for things to really start getting a organized.
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 ?
Fantastic work, Daniel. Keep it up!
Instablaster.
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!
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).
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.
Great project and execution. Bringing the best of LEGO and engineering together in a useful way!
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.
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/
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.
Dude this is amazing and you are amazing, someone get this man some views
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🤣
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!
We want instructions!
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?
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 😁
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
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!
shut up and take my money!!
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!
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!
How is the project going?
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
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.
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.
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
Dang dude that is insane, I’d lose my mind building that thing you. are. truly insane! :)
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
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
This is what Bricklink Shop owners are waiting for xD
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!
We could use that at Gears 2 Robots! So much time is spent sorting Lego Education kits after summer camps and classes!
amazing. Been dreaming up something along these lines for years. Bravo on getting it done!
I would pay for instructions tbh.
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.
My son wants to start a brick business. How do I get a machine like this for him?
Great work! How accurate was the classification?
u are very smart, I have had ideas of a machine like this myself, but never understood how the computer would recognize a part
PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEAASSSSE SELL THIS AND MAKE A COMPANY
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.
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 !
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.
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?
Hard work, passion, creativity, technology, ART!
This is awesome!
wooow... Daniel you made incredible job. I love spend time with brick but sorting for long time is exhausting :D
Very cool project, have been following along on Twitter. Good job 😎
How much to buy it
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!
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 😭
Hello Daniel. Is it possible to use your machine ? I am based in France and my son has about 40 lego boxes.
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.
Please sell this plans and software, I need this 😂!
My only question is: how can one find the parts necessary to build this awesome device, if they haven’t been sorted first?
Wuao 2 años, excelente amigo, saludos desde Perú 🇵🇪
nice machine did you have some instructions?
So cool! i saw this when i was at the Raspberry Pi website.
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.
Could have shown it working a bit more.
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?
This is soooo freakin cool!
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
I find very useful to sort lego by colors
Really nice job !
Hope it will goes even faster !
I love sorting Lego manually ;)
Do you wanna sorte mine too? :P
Me too. It has been my hobby for over 11 years now ... Sorted out some 6 kg's during last week .. ;-)
Very cool! Looking forward to the other video!
Cool design
Can you make this as a lego set
Everyone need this set
Would love to figure out how to build this, awesome work!
You could make a fortune selling the design online for this machine :D
Designing, building, prototyping, programming, bugfixing, and improving it is still probably faster than doing it manually.
Why do you not use one of the LEGO CAD programs for training? That way you can use 3D models with all possible cameras and lighting instead of relying on 2D photographs.
I'll take one!!! Love it
Underrated ngl, great
Any word on if this available?
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?
This is an amazing project. Well done.
Just found your video. Great job!
This would be a fantastic thing to get out to the lego lovers. I am a design and technology teacher with years of experience in sorts of things tech, design, CAD/CAM and even some machine eye stuff, if you'd like some support with the process. I imagine there would be lots of others keen to help you realise your ideas. Just shout out and get a team together. Delegate jobs and lets make this happen.
I'm curious if you will be able to link to resulting brick inventory to the bricklink database, so you instantly can see what sets the lot comprises of (and what stones are missing). Next step would be to sort the bricks straight into bins, dedicated to a single set.
wow! great job!
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.
Your opening statement is wrong. Everyone does not hate sorting Lego. I find it quite relaxing. Nevertheless, your build is amazing. Well done.
Very impressive, and will help so many with other similar, and less similar projects! ❤
You are a genius, absolutely amazing work.
This is insane, how cool!
I used the Lego to sort the Lego.
Wow. You win CZcams this week!
Unfortunately the whole being able to recognize so many parts is thwarted by only separating it into 18 buckets. You need a little over 50 buckets for things to really start getting a organized.
sort each of the 18 bins again to different critera
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.
I cant wait to see what you do next
:) Cheers
If you make this and sell it, you'll be rich.
It's the most wonderful machine in the world.
Absolutely incredible
Next challenge: to build a lego machine for sorting out the problems in my life, and solving them
I need that one too.
"Everyone hates sorting LEGO"
Speak for yourself, I LOVE sorting LEGO.
How can you be sick of sorting? It's the best part of LEGO! But I love your approach.
+1000!
why did you use the 2 green plates and not a conveyer belt?
Hi Daniel, is there any Chance to get the Code/Software? Many thx.
Please tell me you sell the plans?