Every so often while browsing the internet I will come across a project that I absolutely have to make. When I stumbled upon IVC’s Candy Sorting Machine, this was absolutely the case. When my girlfriend eats skittles, she does so by colour – don’t ask me why, she just does it that way. When I watched the video of the candy sorting machine on YouTube, I knew it was going to be the perfect gift for my girlfriend for her birthday. Since this was going to be a gift for someone I really wanted to create it as if it was a consumer product in terms of design. I wanted it to be simple to use and designed so anyone can just turn it on and and it will sort. Video and pictures after the Jump!
Category Archives: Machining
Wearable-Technology Conference in San Fran!

Ring Blinking
On the 8th and 9th of July 2014, there will be an annual wearable-technology conference held in San Francisco. I believe this is the 12th conference Wearable Technologies has organized. This year I have been asked to speak at the conference about my Peltier Ring! You can see the details about the conference here:
http://www.wearable-technologies.com/events/wearable-technologies-conference-2014-usa
I am very excited to see all of the new technologies that will be shown at this event. Also excited to go back to San Fran. If anyone – makers, hackers, fans – want to see the ring and are not able to attend the conference, please let me know, I will be exploring the city all week and networking as much as possible! I would love to check out some hackerspaces as well. If anyone knows the hot spots, let me know!
Past Project: DIY CNC Mill – Pictures
I would say that this was probably my very first project in the field of robotics. When I was finishing up my last year of high school – maybe 2007? – somewhere online I discovered a world of DIY CNC machines; I had to make one myself. This is a little blast from the past since just today I rediscovered the following pictures. This was such a fun project and I learned a lot from it. Sadly after I finished it, it didn’t get much use. I had power supply and table alignment issues, and a lack of funding to fix it. The best part of this project is the inspiration it gave to my friend, John Grimsmo. After seeing it, this got him into CNC machines and he is now running a successful business using them – http://www.grimsmoknives.com/
Hit more to see more pictures of my first hacked together CNC machine.
Energy Scavenging Ring – Part 2 – Ring Design/Machining
The basic idea for this ring was to take a piece of a aluminum to make the ring out of, design it to fit the PCB and peltier, and create a heatsink that mounts on the other side of the peltier unit. Originally I had planed to make this a single finger ring but somewhere along the way my brain had fallen for a 2 finger design; It was much more practical, and surprisingly the PCB I made was the perfect size to fit across two fingers, leaving the heat sink on the side. Oddly enough I have a few ring sizing tools hanging around (thanks to my Grandpa having lots of random tools) so I measured the two fingers it would go on and away I went with a design.
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