Wiring Photo
Plinko under construction
Finished plinko machine with conveyor

Inspiration

Identifying resistors is a time consuming and difficult thing all electrical and many other types of engineers face.

What it does

Our project finds the resistance of each resistor and sorts them into buckets for their resistance.

How we built it

We run 5 volts at 20 Ma through each resistor, which is dropped into our testing tray one by one by our conveyor belt, and use the returned voltage to find the resistance. Then we use our Plinko-like sorting system to move each resistor into its respective bucket.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was that the calculated resistances were not exactly the real resistances so we had to manually configure the system for each type of resistor because we didn't have perfect 0 resistance wires. We also struggled to find a system to dispense the resistors one by one so that a person didn't have to stand over the system and drop the resistors one by one, but we eventually designed a working conveyor belt to fix this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our conveyor belt system as it took a very long time and many iterations to make it work well enough and consistently enough for our system to sort each resistor before another is dropped.

What we learned

We learned how to design and iterate a project as well as how to use a number of electrical components like a lcd screen and an OLed screen to display information about the machines state to the user.