For my mechanical engineering capstone design project, I designed an automatic game piece sorter. I am interested in entering the field of mechatronics and automation after graduation, and this was the perfect project to practice relevant skills.

This device sorts game pieces from the board game Ticket To Ride: Rails & Sails. There are 5 unique colours (red, green, blue, yellow, black), and two shapes (ships and trains). The colour is identified using a TCS34725 colour sensor paired with a white LED to light up the subject. The red chute then uses the colour information to choose one of 5 chutes for the game piece. Finally, the game piece slides over a rotating magnetic drum. The train game pieces were modified to have metal inserts, so they stick to the drum and are deposited in the rear wooden bins, while the unmodified ships fall in the front wooden bins.

Here is a demo video (54s). More work needs to be done to get a fully automatic hopper, since there are irregular clogging issues with the current hopper design. The colour dosing mechanism was hand fed to decouple that part of the system.

My team and I gave a presentation about the intertwined design and prototyping process at the end of our semester. Here is the video:

Here is the electronics schematic. The code that the Arduino Pro Micro is programmed with is available on GitHub: Link. If you have further questions, please reach out via email!