It’s taken up ’til now to fill a major gap in technology: candy sorting.
Like a coin sorter, this invention by Willem Pennings, a mechanical engineering student, organizes M&Ms and Skittles by color. He posted his creation on Reddit more than a week ago and has already attracted more than 2,400 comments. Of course, as Reddit likes to do, the string quickly turned into a discussion about vodka-infusions and Van Halen’s backstage rider.
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Other Redditors missed the point completely by suggesting that someone who wants their candy separated should just go to a candy store. But most were incredibly impressed with the sleek, sellable look of the thing and suggested if IKEA started selling it, it’d fly off shelves.
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As seen in the video, the machine separates by color only — it does not differentiate between M&Ms and Skittles.
Pennings  says the machine also detects jams.
The measurement wheel takes a certain amount of time to rotate 90 degrees. For this machine, it’s about 200 milliseconds. So, if the rotation is taking more than 250 milliseconds, a jam is detected and the wheel goes in reverse to clear the slot. If that doesn’t fix it, the machine quits!
He says his machine is capable of sorting any equivalent-sized candy, such as Smarties.
I wouldn’t be able to use this machine for peanut M&Ms since the sizes vary so much. For Skittles, smarties and M&Ms etc. this works perfectly fine.
What a time to be alive!
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