Hi makers — I’m building an open-source machine that identifies, inspects, and sorts coins, with nearly every structural and mechanical part printed on the U1. The fun bits: co-printed TPU flexures (hopper wiper, brake brushes, gate pads), a multispectral camera station (UV fluorescence catches cleaned/altered coins; photometric stereo makes doubled dies pop), a line-laser height map, and eight software-defined sort bins, sort by denomination today, by decade or silver content tomorrow.
How it works: a printed singulation disk feeds one coin at a time onto a gravity slide rail (no belt) to a glass platen, where two machine-vision cameras image both faces at once under sequentially lit white, UV, IR, and narrowband lighting, plus a red line laser for a height profile. On-device ML reads the date and mint mark, flags errors/silver/cleaning, and a servo gate drops each coin into its bin. Side-by-side double feeds are captured by the cameras and automatically recirculated.
It’s designed around what only the U1 can print: co-printed rigid+flexible parts in one job, multicolor calibration targets, and rail surfaces that use the bed finish as the coin’s slide surface. Two documented build tiers (a ~$900 budget build and a ~$1,650 flagship) for others to reproduce.
Repo (CAD, BOM with sourced part numbers, protocol spec, build docs going up as they stabilize): GitHub - stemscoutdad/scout-coinscan: SCOUT CoinScan — Sorting Coins Optically with UV Technology. Open-source coin identification, grading-assist, and sorting machine printed on the Snapmaker U1. · GitHub
I’ll post milestone videos in this thread, imaging station first (targeting July), then transport and sorting. Feedback very welcome, especially from anyone who’s fought coin-hopper jams before. Entered in the Snapmaker Innovation Fund, Phase 1. If it looks interesting, a GitHub star is hugely appreciated; it helps in the Fund’s community vote.
