For the past 10 week, I've not played Factorio very much because I've been busy: We've been working on an automation project for school as part of my minor Smart Manufacturing& Robotics.
It's a robot arm that removes products from a machine and puts them on a strip to prepare for packaging. Right now this happens with a single-purpose machine for 1 product family. All other product families the factory produces are packed by hand. The "assembler"(wire forming CNC machine) has iron wire as input, and outputs a lot of wire products per minute. So making it a blue inserter was necessary
I primarily worked on the programming of it, as that is my forte within the group as an Electrical engineer. The other 3 are Mechanical engineers so they took most of the physical parts of the work on them. It does communication with the production machine to synchronise, as you don't want the arm to be inside the machine when it's not done processing the wire, as well as sensoring whether a product is actually grabbed(errors may still happen, though are rare)
It's not as flexible as the inserters in factorio, it's only programmed to work with 2 product families at the moment. But it's made to be expanded upon so most products at their factory may eventually be automated like this.
You can view the video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwbNZtPUEOU
I'm not actually in the video, but you can see my laptop, wallet and lunch
Next year, the minor will be a European Project Semester. If you also want to learn about automation and robotics, you can find more information(and my classmates' projects) at http://www.delftrobots.nl/
