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This LEGO robot will sort your Halloween sweets for you

If you happen to live in one of those suburbs that goes big on Halloween and is planning on a big US-style “trick or treat” evening this weekend, you’ll be familiar with what we’re going to call the “candy conundrum”. A group of kids goes out, comes back with a bucket of sugary treats, and then starts trading Jelly Babies for lollipops because the distribution of loot was uneven.

How do you make it fair for all? Simply empty the whole lot into one big pile and let this awesome sorting machine built from LEGO divide up the proceeds equally.

The design is by Dexter Industries and it’s a wonderfully over-engineered mechanism for divvying up small choclate bars into a good or bad pile.

It uses LEGO for both the structure of the machine as well as the motors. This comes from LEGO’s Mindstorms range that is usually used to make beginner robotics.

Thing’s become interesting with BrickPi – a kit that interfaces the locked down, proprietary LEGO Mindstorms with the open source versatility of a Raspberry Pi. In this project it was used to hook up a camera and connect the project to Google Cloud Vision.

The camera snaps a picture off the chocolate bar and sends it to Google’s servers where it can automatically detect the brand. This is compared against a pre-installed list of “good” and “bad” brands and then dumped into the appropriate pile.

If you want to build your own, the full instructions can be found on hackster.io.

If you already have the expensive LEGO Mindstorms kit (R5 290 the last time we checked) you could pull off the same result by applying coloured stickers to the chocolate and using the included colour sensors to do the sorting. But since BrickPi doesn’t often crop up despite the number of LEGO stories we write, and we thought it would be great to show it off to you too.

Finally, because one wasn’t enough, there is another LEGO Halloween candy machine that was also created recently. Created by Jason Allemann (the same man who helped create the awesome LEGO Maze set), this machine is made to throw candy at youngsters instead of sort it:

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