It's not a matter of detection, it's purely mechanical. There's a track/rail that only the upper part of the bottle can fit into. If the bottle is upsidedown, it will naturally flip back over when it gets to the end of the track thanks to the ramp. If it's the bottom of the bottle, it will never slide into that track to begin with, staying in the correct upright orientation til the end
Especially if it’s all from scratch, if it’s an addition to a current machine that’s more of a local problem to solve but when making a whole new machine there’s so much to anticipate.
I make hobby scale versions of industrial machines. Little desktop cnc mills especially, but a 3d printer is a gateway drug to stuff like this. It's a very fun thing to learn about various mechanisms, linkages, and contraptions. It's also a very accessible and affordable. Steppers and servos are almost unbelievably cheap and easy to run these days. It's the adult version of Lego mindstorm.
You'd be surprised what you can do with some 2020 or 4040 aluminum extrusion, some stepper motors, and a few belts and skateboard bearings. There is a site called open builds that let's you make stuff like this if you're into it.
Oh man, that is cool. I have too many projects on the go to get started on those kind yet! I’m for sure gonna spend some time on there though for that hit.
Do you have any specific 3D Printers you'd personally recommend? I've wanted to get into and just to mess around, but I've seen some reviews that say most of the budget printers are pure dogshit
I'm not the op, but from what I've read it seems like bambu are far and away the best value. I've been inching towards getting one for a few years. They have made some software model changes that people rightfully disagree with, but even with that it still seems like they're the best for the money.
I'm looking at getting the bambu p2s with the ams add-on which will let you print multiple colors in a single print. To have that capability with the quality of the bambu printer is honestly unbelievable. The printer is $550 and the addon is $250.
I would still encourage you to research as much as you can because I am by no means an authority on the topic.
From scratch there's a lot of back and forth between engineering and assembly people talking about what "should" work and what actually works. We go back and forth for a long time, get it to work and then finally test, run and ship the final product. It's a very proud moment to finally get it right. Then, a few years later: the same company or a different company with a silimar product will order another machine that does pretty much the exact same thing.
This is an excellent opportunity for engineers to revist the portion of the process where we talked about amd decided what should work and what actually works. Very cool job that can be very, very frustrating.
I do a backyard version of this for a small company, my boss will email me with a problem and we will bounce and revise ideas until we find one we think addresses whatever problem and then I build and test on a small scale. If it works we tweak again and send it. Very fulfilling!
You got it backwards. The bottles are on the rail as soon as they drop through the dividers. The upside-down bottles are allowed to fall off the rail in order to be flipped by the next track. The bottom of the bottle never slides off.
It doesn't "detect". It's this rail on the bottom set in the right place. If the bottle is flipped, the narrow mouth hits the bottom rail and gets pushed and then it tips over into the other rail that flips it right sides up. If it's already right side up, the wide base doesn't get affected by the bottom rail.
that or they already had the machines on either side of this, but with I/O that wouldn't be compatible with that kind of feed (maybe the bottles get produced in a grid rather than a line, and are dropped rather than placed, or whatever), so this (or similar) ended up their far cheaper option vs replacing something expensive, especially if this had been a fully manual process prior to the slaparounder (labor is expensive!).
u should see the previous step. originally the bottles are of any color, so they let them drop into a huge pool of white paint. after flushing it away, the now white bottles enter the slapper immediately.
also there's a tiny elephant playing piano involved in the next process
A slide. They all show up on the conveyer neat and tidy on their side and lined up. Just have a gear with tooth gaps big enough for the bottles and a feed ram that pushes them sideways out of the gear. The gear holds them steady and ques the next set, the ram shoves them off the side onto a vertical slide/shoot that holds 10 or so. Have a pneumatic pin on the bottom that is in time with the slots they go in. Keep the bottle flipper. Cause that's cool.
I've worked in some bottling plants, placing bottles in the correct orientation on the conveyor belt for minimum wage on night time shifts on weekends.
It paid for the beer during my university years so I'm not complaining.
Yeah, I work at a plant that uses robotic suction-tipped arms that pick and place bottles into the correct orientation on a belt. They use cameras to detects it orientation on the infeed to determine the proper rotation to the place on the outfeed. This operation looks honestly ridiculous and archaic to me.
Yea that sub gets brought up a lot on /r/toolgifs, but i'd say this is one of the few that truly belongs there.
It's just wild to me some engineer came up with this as the best solution, and also that this even works at all. Like i'm not surprised it works for like.. an hour, but they must have made sure this thing can run without issue for thousands of hours, that's wild to me.
Packaging engineer here. I'm almost certain this wasn't plan A. Looks to me like they threw enough shit at the wall until something stuck. Then polished it up to make it look like it was meant to be there (at least for the second machine onwards)
The rails are the true work of art. Rarely designed by an engineer and instead crafted by a skilled tradesman
I think its pretty smart. Why make an expensive vision system when a motor with a slapper puts out the same rights sided bottles per minute? The way it's shot isnhard to tell the sprocket is at a 45 degree angle. The bottles dont need much help falling into the slots, just keeps things from piling up. Also the footprint is pretty small for the work its doing.
Yes, computer vision and other complexities are the last resort. The simplest solution (that I guessing didn't work for some reason) would be a static piece of metal that the bottles run into and get knocked over. No moving parts.
This is why grade school science teachers have kids invent the most ridiculous things for bizarre scenarios - you very much never know what kind of scenarios you'll need to solve IRL!
As someone with a specialisation in the fill & pack machinery world. This machine sucks. Useless moving parts, slow and will damage your bottles. My facorite unscramblers are made by a brand called Posimat. The revolving part is the good bit. Passive rails no moving parts that require maintenace.
These are definitely the pre-made protein drinks either Muscle Milk or one of the numerous other ones that have flavors like chocolate shake and cookies and cream
Whenever I see something like that I wonder if some engineer designed it in a super complicated way of doing it and then some other guy said: “why don’t we just put in big ‘bottle slapper in there?’ and they did, and it worked like a charm 🤔
This seems so slow. We have machines orienting similar bottles at 250 per minute using a 3 stage system that lays them all down, then a hook will either catch the neck of the bottle and flip it or not and it passes through to two wedges that flips them all upside down to over a station which uses static electricity to pull any charged particles out of the bottles, and finally a bump which orients all of bottles upright on a conveyor belt.
And our machines are all like 20 years old and not cutting edge tech for 20 years ago.
Is this really the best way? I'm mean it's hilarious to say, "y'all my job at the factory is managing the bottle twacker." But this doesn't seem real lol
I did a week of 12hr shifts at a vitamin factory many years ago. I mostly did the job of whatever machine was broken that day, so two days loading bottles on to a conveyor, one day putting labels on them, one packing filled bottles into boxes... So boring!
Almost as bad as the two weeks I spent loading bread into an industrial oven for 12hrs a day. Fuck menial labour!
I love when manufacturing solutions are just randomly moving things to fit in a certain orientation. The first one I saw was a vibratory bowl feeder for little lightbulbs. Just vibrates the bulbs up a track along the bowl (that’s already cool) and as they go along the track, it mechanically filters out all the bulbs facing the wrong way. Then those ones go back to the bottom of the bowl to try again.
Why is this machine necessary (assuming it's not just for fun)? The bottles are already lined up, and I don't think you need a silly slapper to turn them 90°, unite them into a single line and flip them.
Usually bottles are purchased in cases un oriented. Operators dump them into a hopper and a feeder drops a few bottles in at a time. They need to be stood up for filling in the next step.
These type of machines are called bottle descramblers. Lots of different varieties. This one is actually pretty cool, orients the bottles in a pretty small foot print on the filling line.
The ones is use on my floor will turn the bottles upside down, blow and vacuum the inside before righting them up again
My guess is the maker of the machine recommended they change the shape of the bottles to accommodate a simpler and more effective mechanism and customer said no.
Kinda. The bottles probably are more likely to flip one side or the other due to weight distribution. Also the flipper mechanism means that as long as a bottle is in one of the slots, it will be rotated into the correct orientation. Even with random chance, there will be a steady flow into and out of the system so it doesn't really matter how long an individual bottle takes to be flipped.
Yes, I imagine statistically a system like this just needs a few % higher chance to flip vertically and with enough shaking they all fall into place eventually
I’m more interested in how that mechanism works to detect if a bottle needs to be flipped over.
https://preview.redd.it/58u0jpc2h79g1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=4f10c7c0e77cd5063af3ed7d824b45fe859f7a47
It's not a matter of detection, it's purely mechanical. There's a track/rail that only the upper part of the bottle can fit into. If the bottle is upsidedown, it will naturally flip back over when it gets to the end of the track thanks to the ramp. If it's the bottom of the bottle, it will never slide into that track to begin with, staying in the correct upright orientation til the end
Man, machines are cool as fuck...
I have a lot of respect for the people who design these machines.
Especially if it’s all from scratch, if it’s an addition to a current machine that’s more of a local problem to solve but when making a whole new machine there’s so much to anticipate.
I make hobby scale versions of industrial machines. Little desktop cnc mills especially, but a 3d printer is a gateway drug to stuff like this. It's a very fun thing to learn about various mechanisms, linkages, and contraptions. It's also a very accessible and affordable. Steppers and servos are almost unbelievably cheap and easy to run these days. It's the adult version of Lego mindstorm.
You'd be surprised what you can do with some 2020 or 4040 aluminum extrusion, some stepper motors, and a few belts and skateboard bearings. There is a site called open builds that let's you make stuff like this if you're into it.
https://builds.openbuilds.com/
Oh man, that is cool. I have too many projects on the go to get started on those kind yet! I’m for sure gonna spend some time on there though for that hit.
Do you have any specific 3D Printers you'd personally recommend? I've wanted to get into and just to mess around, but I've seen some reviews that say most of the budget printers are pure dogshit
I'm not the op, but from what I've read it seems like bambu are far and away the best value. I've been inching towards getting one for a few years. They have made some software model changes that people rightfully disagree with, but even with that it still seems like they're the best for the money.
I'm looking at getting the bambu p2s with the ams add-on which will let you print multiple colors in a single print. To have that capability with the quality of the bambu printer is honestly unbelievable. The printer is $550 and the addon is $250.
I would still encourage you to research as much as you can because I am by no means an authority on the topic.
Looks like they're shuttering sadly
From scratch there's a lot of back and forth between engineering and assembly people talking about what "should" work and what actually works. We go back and forth for a long time, get it to work and then finally test, run and ship the final product. It's a very proud moment to finally get it right. Then, a few years later: the same company or a different company with a silimar product will order another machine that does pretty much the exact same thing.
This is an excellent opportunity for engineers to revist the portion of the process where we talked about amd decided what should work and what actually works. Very cool job that can be very, very frustrating.
I do a backyard version of this for a small company, my boss will email me with a problem and we will bounce and revise ideas until we find one we think addresses whatever problem and then I build and test on a small scale. If it works we tweak again and send it. Very fulfilling!
That's a how many problems can we solve in one spot
I worked as a machinist for a while. You should have some respect for the people that design these machines, but don’t overshoot.
Especially when they're super simplistic, it would have been very easy to overly complicate that process with sensors cameras and solenoids.
Really ingenious!
Purely mechanical stuff will never not be cool.
I was like "lol funny bottle kicker" to "whoa how did it just flip those bottles over??"
And the bottles are kept against the wall by centrifugal force.
Pool table white ball returns can work like that if the white ball is a different size. There are multiple ways to return a white. One uses magnets.
Thanks sir! I was going to ask that
Plus it looks like you could scale it to different size bottle by stacking more of those rotating layers on top of each other.
It looked like the thinner bottle top causes it to fall slightly to a part that nudges it over to the rail which then flips it over.
You got it backwards. The bottles are on the rail as soon as they drop through the dividers. The upside-down bottles are allowed to fall off the rail in order to be flipped by the next track. The bottom of the bottle never slides off.
Now this is an impressive doohickey.
It doesn't "detect". It's this rail on the bottom set in the right place. If the bottle is flipped, the narrow mouth hits the bottom rail and gets pushed and then it tips over into the other rail that flips it right sides up. If it's already right side up, the wide base doesn't get affected by the bottom rail.
Yes, the slapper is great, but I really like the reorientation piece
The part you’re referring to is called the “arounder”
Looks like the neck of the bottle drops down behind the flipper upperer but the base is too wide
its simple. all bottles get flipped over.
you see the yellow slapper on the left? it kicks out all upright bottles.
Yeah seems pretty cool, I wouldn't be the guy that figured out how to make this happen, and I'm sure it's fairly simple 😅
I think it blows air
So are there… less ridiculous options?
we could pay some poor person to do it.
Some poor person or some poor person?
Both
Why can't they pay us poor people to design these machines instead :(
Direct feed from the blow molder into a conveyor. That holds them just below the threads and blows them off to the filler.
Works so much better.
Is it possible they source the bottles from somewhere else?
that or they already had the machines on either side of this, but with I/O that wouldn't be compatible with that kind of feed (maybe the bottles get produced in a grid rather than a line, and are dropped rather than placed, or whatever), so this (or similar) ended up their far cheaper option vs replacing something expensive, especially if this had been a fully manual process prior to the slaparounder (labor is expensive!).
That would be my guess. If you can't afford or don't want to deal with a blow molder and are willing to order blown bottles it works.
Its not at all efficient tho
It doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be faster than the next process
I dont understand the question.
Are you saying you dont want the bottle slapper 5000?
If you're not a serious businessman, what are we even doing here?
u should see the previous step. originally the bottles are of any color, so they let them drop into a huge pool of white paint. after flushing it away, the now white bottles enter the slapper immediately.
also there's a tiny elephant playing piano involved in the next process
A slide. They all show up on the conveyer neat and tidy on their side and lined up. Just have a gear with tooth gaps big enough for the bottles and a feed ram that pushes them sideways out of the gear. The gear holds them steady and ques the next set, the ram shoves them off the side onto a vertical slide/shoot that holds 10 or so. Have a pneumatic pin on the bottom that is in time with the slots they go in. Keep the bottle flipper. Cause that's cool.
Yes, me.
I've worked in some bottling plants, placing bottles in the correct orientation on the conveyor belt for minimum wage on night time shifts on weekends.
It paid for the beer during my university years so I'm not complaining.
I had the same question, phrased much less hilariously.
It's effective, it's just doesn't seem very efficient.
This is a great example of a technology thats going to lose its job to humans.
Yeah, I work at a plant that uses robotic suction-tipped arms that pick and place bottles into the correct orientation on a belt. They use cameras to detects it orientation on the infeed to determine the proper rotation to the place on the outfeed. This operation looks honestly ridiculous and archaic to me.
Yeah, I mean I'm not an industrial engineer but I imagine there has to be a more elegant way to accomplish this haha
r/doohickeycorporation is seeking legal action for the illegal use of their equipment.
Yea that sub gets brought up a lot on /r/toolgifs, but i'd say this is one of the few that truly belongs there.
It's just wild to me some engineer came up with this as the best solution, and also that this even works at all. Like i'm not surprised it works for like.. an hour, but they must have made sure this thing can run without issue for thousands of hours, that's wild to me.
Right? By the end of this thing's useful life, it will have spun millions of times, slapping tens of thousands of bottles.
I wonder which components wear out first and need replacing, only to allow to spin and slap for tens of thousands more hours.
My guess is bearings first then coupling then motor
Packaging engineer here. I'm almost certain this wasn't plan A. Looks to me like they threw enough shit at the wall until something stuck. Then polished it up to make it look like it was meant to be there (at least for the second machine onwards)
The rails are the true work of art. Rarely designed by an engineer and instead crafted by a skilled tradesman
I think its pretty smart. Why make an expensive vision system when a motor with a slapper puts out the same rights sided bottles per minute? The way it's shot isnhard to tell the sprocket is at a 45 degree angle. The bottles dont need much help falling into the slots, just keeps things from piling up. Also the footprint is pretty small for the work its doing.
Yes, computer vision and other complexities are the last resort. The simplest solution (that I guessing didn't work for some reason) would be a static piece of metal that the bottles run into and get knocked over. No moving parts.
Prevents bottles from "clumping" and just skipping slots for long periods of time most likely.
Know your place bottle!
How can she slap?
HOW CAN SHE SLAP?!
The best part was when it slapped the bottles
Chaos spanker.
Love the name 😂
Between the G spot & slap-arounder u/toolgifs is on a roll
It's the official nomenclature 😂
This is why grade school science teachers have kids invent the most ridiculous things for bizarre scenarios - you very much never know what kind of scenarios you'll need to solve IRL!
The beatings will continue until morale improves
Tappatappatappatappatappatappa
”This machine and others like it have displaced thousands of Lavernes and Shirleys”
<Sarah McLachlan song plays>
Slaparounder and righsideupper.
I used to work in a place where this had to be done manually. A person would dump a whole box of bottles and then manually arrange them.
This thing slaps
Tool gifs is always amazing. Absolutely excellent quality content every day amazing work team! Happy holidays!
Thank you Toolgifs for being my favourite sub! Love everything about this is sub, just simple tool stuff, no drama and the good ole watermark
Spent the whole video looking for the hidden r/toolgifs.
Was not disappointed.
Oh, the machine's cool too.
I usually watch once for the joy of the gif and then another 2 or 3 times to hunt the hidden r/toolgifs.
I wonder if it doesnt randomly kick the bottles straight to the end and mess up everything
r/oddlyarousing
In the background near the end on a blue crate
It slaps real good
Thats simple and complicated
TEKNOLOGIA!
Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcpREiHx1CM
Feeders are always mechanical wizardry. Love it!
'Fucking get in there you twat' machine.
I was convinced this was just a funny looking malfunction for the whole first half.
You have a gift for naming things, OP.
SMACK MY BOTTLE UP!!
SMACK MY BOTTLE UP!!
Order from chaos.
Automation is fun
You shall NOT pass!!
"What is my purpose?" "You slap bottles" "Omg... I love my life!"
This shouldn’t be so oddly satisfying
Only to later be flipped right back down the same way
I see Leonard de Quirm's naming convention is alive and well.
Love the highly technical name
Stuff like this is amazing. But the guy that created it... Genius.
I like how fun this is. They easily could have just designed a ramp with a height bar and a wider opening shaped like a funnel.
But that's too cold and calculated. Slappy jar bar it is!
As someone with a specialisation in the fill & pack machinery world. This machine sucks. Useless moving parts, slow and will damage your bottles. My facorite unscramblers are made by a brand called Posimat. The revolving part is the good bit. Passive rails no moving parts that require maintenace.
I love to see a system that works...
My best guess, bottle tiller?
Inversion rotary smackinator
These are definitely the pre-made protein drinks either Muscle Milk or one of the numerous other ones that have flavors like chocolate shake and cookies and cream
The one bottle that gets stuck in the middle of the spinning plate and stops the whole damn production.
Maybe make the gear disc convex?
Turning on the sound, is the place meant to sound like an arcade?
Surely there’s a better way
Whenever I see something like that I wonder if some engineer designed it in a super complicated way of doing it and then some other guy said: “why don’t we just put in big ‘bottle slapper in there?’ and they did, and it worked like a charm 🤔
There’s gotta be a better way.
for some reason, I like this video
I'm guessing the bottom weighs more than the top
Judgement day, the road begins here
Slap arounder? I hardly know her
The engineering was difficult at first but, once they built a machine that really slapped, everything just started falling into place.
If the idea is to orient them all in the same upright(or downward) position, there has to be a more effective way of doing it than this, right?
This seems so slow. We have machines orienting similar bottles at 250 per minute using a 3 stage system that lays them all down, then a hook will either catch the neck of the bottle and flip it or not and it passes through to two wedges that flips them all upside down to over a station which uses static electricity to pull any charged particles out of the bottles, and finally a bump which orients all of bottles upright on a conveyor belt.
And our machines are all like 20 years old and not cutting edge tech for 20 years ago.
This is not genius but genius
“Jenkins, I’m concerned that your feelings have been affecting your design choices ever since learning that your actual father was the milkman”
How much Adderall is used in the design of this machine
Beautiful design
Is this really the best way? I'm mean it's hilarious to say, "y'all my job at the factory is managing the bottle twacker." But this doesn't seem real lol
I did a week of 12hr shifts at a vitamin factory many years ago. I mostly did the job of whatever machine was broken that day, so two days loading bottles on to a conveyor, one day putting labels on them, one packing filled bottles into boxes... So boring!
Almost as bad as the two weeks I spent loading bread into an industrial oven for 12hrs a day. Fuck menial labour!
I love how imprecise it is. It just a keeps knocking them about until they happen to end up in the right spot... eventually.
Theoretically the same bottle could be bouncing around in there for days before it lands in the right apot.
Wizard magic!
How it is detecting whether the bottle is upside down and realigning it , while the straight aligned bottles are going ahead ?
I don’t think it’s detecting them. I think the part where it gets flipped over has a path for the bottles that only the mouthpiece can fit down.
Ahhh.. okay..
I had to really look at what this was, as at first I thought this was a reloading gif, as the machine looks very similar to a case feeder.
Ive seen some pretty wild processes while working in manufacturing, if it works it works lol
I love when manufacturing solutions are just randomly moving things to fit in a certain orientation. The first one I saw was a vibratory bowl feeder for little lightbulbs. Just vibrates the bulbs up a track along the bowl (that’s already cool) and as they go along the track, it mechanically filters out all the bulbs facing the wrong way. Then those ones go back to the bottom of the bowl to try again.
Real use of bogo sort?
Happy Slap-versary everyone!
As long as it doesn't start flipping tables...
Why is this machine necessary (assuming it's not just for fun)? The bottles are already lined up, and I don't think you need a silly slapper to turn them 90°, unite them into a single line and flip them.
Usually bottles are purchased in cases un oriented. Operators dump them into a hopper and a feeder drops a few bottles in at a time. They need to be stood up for filling in the next step.
These type of machines are called bottle descramblers. Lots of different varieties. This one is actually pretty cool, orients the bottles in a pretty small foot print on the filling line.
The ones is use on my floor will turn the bottles upside down, blow and vacuum the inside before righting them up again
My guess is the maker of the machine recommended they change the shape of the bottles to accommodate a simpler and more effective mechanism and customer said no.
So basically try a lot of random variations until it orients itself correctly by pure chance
Kinda. The bottles probably are more likely to flip one side or the other due to weight distribution. Also the flipper mechanism means that as long as a bottle is in one of the slots, it will be rotated into the correct orientation. Even with random chance, there will be a steady flow into and out of the system so it doesn't really matter how long an individual bottle takes to be flipped.
Yes, I imagine statistically a system like this just needs a few % higher chance to flip vertically and with enough shaking they all fall into place eventually