It's Pi all the way down with this Pi-Powered Pi-Picking Robot

While most of us live in a world where the once ubiquitous Raspberry Pi is now as rare as chickens teeth, there is a magical place where they have so many Pis they needed to build a robotic distributor to take Pi orders. And to add insult to injury, they even built this magical machine using a Raspberry Pi. The horror.

This magical place? Australia, of course. There is no date posted on the Pi Australia article linked above, but it does mention that there is a Pi 4 Model B running the show, which makes it at least recent. Stock is stored in a set of angled bins accessed by a shuttle mechanism via an X-Y gantry. The shuttle docks in front of a bin and uses a stepper finger to flip a box over the lip that holds them in its bin. Once in the shuttle, the order is transported to a set of output bins, where a servo operates a flap to unceremoniously empty the product for packing and shipping. There's a video of a full cycle below, but a word of warning - the stepper motors on the X-Y gantry are really screaming, so you might want to turn the volume down.

The article not only details the construction of "Bishop" - named after the heroic synthetic organism in Aliens - but also the challenges encountered during construction. It turns out that even when you try to use gravity to simplify a system like this, things can very easily go wrong. There are also quite a few details about the software, which surprisingly focuses on LinuxCNC. And there are plans to go further, with another robot to pack, seal and label the order. If they need all that automation there, we guess we've found all the Pis missing.

Thanks to [Nick owen] for the advice.