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

[Jonathan Foote]

Heyo.

As a former Xerox employee, I  will note that paper handling can be tricky.

CTP built a robot to dispense single business cards using a gripper
wheel, and I think he had trouble making it reliable. Maybe ask him
about it?

If I were doing this, I would use the vending machine spiral trick.
You can make the spirals really tight to hold a decent number of
cards. Here are some surplus motors that have a rotation sensor so you
can rig them to turn exactly once:

http://skycraftsurplus.com/12vdcvendingmachinegearboxmotor.aspx

 HTH

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Michael Shiloh
<michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>