Finally! Machine Sorts Candy By Color (Video)

Skittles are the candy that let you taste the rainbow, but sometimes you don’t want the full rainbow. Angeli Kakade (@angelikakade) has the story:

Ever open a bag of candy and want to remove your least favorite flavor? Or maybe you get a certain satisfaction out of sorting your candies by color before eating them? One 19-year-old student found a solution: a candy color-sorting machine.

Willem Pennings is a mechanical engineering student at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and was inspired to create his own candy color-sorting machine after seeing a video of one a few years ago. The ambitious student spent five months working on the project in his free time and invested almost 500 euros ($537 US) in the project.

The machine works by using an RGB sensor to recognize what color item has entered the machine and can sort two pieces of M&M’s or Skittles per second. It then drops the candy into the bowls assigned to its color using a stepper motor.