[Noisebridge-discuss] building fortune machine contraption: how to print or dispense a single business-card sized fortune?

Michael Shiloh michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 25 03:32:13 UTC 2010


Noisebridge, meet Sarah, one of my students at SFSU.

Sarah, meet Noisebridge, an extremely friendly, smart, and helpful 
collection of geeks.


Sarah's project requires dispensing a fortune on a piece of paper or 
card about the size of a business card. The question is how to dispense 
the fortune with an inexpensive and not terribly complicated mechanism.

The fortunes are different, but not randomly dispensed. Imagine a dozen 
(Sarah, is this about right?) different card stacks, and depending on 
which buttons were pressed, a single card would be dispensed from a 
certain stack. So, whatever mechanism is used, there must be one for 
each stack of cards.

A robot arm that carefully chooses a stack and then ever more carefully 
picks up a single card from the stack would be ideal, if you have one 
lying around to donate.

We don't have the time or machine tools to build a custom card 
dispenser, but perhaps you can think of something pretty close that can 
be repurposed? Like a giant Pez dispenser?

Sarah is also willing to be very flexible in terms of the size and 
material of the card, so if it has to be bigger or thicker that's OK.

Sarah's worst case solution is to stick a laptop and a printer in there, 
and custom-print each fortune, so any ideas that improve upon this are 
welcomed.

(I wonder whether you can get mechanisms from those machines that sell 
trinkets in plastic eggs. The trinkets are odd shapes, but the plastic 
egg is easily dispensed by a rotating drum with a hole in in the size of 
the egg. Of course it's still not trivial and building 12 is 12 times 
more time and materials, and you have to buy hundreds of empty plastic 
eggs, assuming you can find them for sale in bulk. Ok, not a great idea)



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