I Made a Working Lego Coin Sorter 

I fix coin sorters for large grocery stores. The dirtiness of coins cause issues even in the best sorters. The best coin sorter i have worked on uses a rotating near virticle rubber wheel to get the coins on their side, then it will sort by height by knocking the tallest off the track first then getting smaller. Hard to explain in a RU-vid comment. Great first attempt

Because dimes used to be silver, whichnisnworth more than copper and nickle, so a smaller amount is more valuable.

Now make a machine to sort legos. Out of coins.

For the problem with the coins getting stuck maybe take away the turn since it's losing a lot of it's momentum while going into that turn. And maybe add some sort of power function system that is able to vibrate the actual sorter so that even if the coins do get stuck they'll eventually fall into the desired slots. As for the coin being on top of each other maybe you could have some sort of system that will allow only the thickness of one coin to go into it although this could pose a threat to the machine being constantly jammed. I hope you develop this project further as I don't see too many coin sorting machines out of lego.

If you look at the Japanese ticket machines or tills, you may find some inspiration: you can throw money inside and the machine will perfectly count the money and also identifies the ticket you are using in-between the coins (for machines in buses, where you throw the money and ticket all together before exiting the bus, to demonstrate you paid the fare). Anyway, it's basically a funnel, but designed in a way that the weight will not jam everything.

The coins are stacking because they climb over the ones that are stuck. Keep them from getting stuck. A small motor with a counter-balanced weight on the end can be used for a vibrator. Tilt the assembly slightly vertical more yes, but with the angle you need to get them to roll by themselves you will not have as much help from gravity, they will most likely have too much speed and roll right past the hole. As someone said, put a funnel and take out the turn. I would add the vibrator to the finish line of the assembly and a tapered gate with fingers at the bridge from the funnel, preferably with flexible material to help reduce jamming.

Where's the scene from the thumbnail?

Coin sizes were set when it took $0.10 of silver, pennies were made of copper and the size was the amount of copper to equal $0.01. The Nickle was how much nickle was worth $0.05. And so on. Now none of the coins are made of solid whatever substance, and it costs far more to make a penny than what it is worth.

Most coin sorting banks don't sort by value. They sort by size. So the dime would be the first bin while the 50¢ piece would be on the end.

One of my first custom LEGO builds (i.e. not following instructions included in a set) was a coin sorter that could differentiate between 2€, 1€ and 20cent coins. It worked flawlessly and is still standing as part of the wall of a little LEGO house in the attic in pur house back in Germany.

If you say the half-dollars are huge, image the ike dollar (eisenhower dollars). They were the dollar coins before the sacagawea dollars and the small presidential ones. They were twice the size of half-dollars (in weight). Also, dimes are the smallest because before, they were worth their weight in silver. So the weight of the coin was the value. However, for pennies and nickels the metal was not the same.

Oh man this is the kind of project I like doing with patrons at my library (mostly kids but I wish more adults would get into it too - my programs are designed for certain age ranges but all of them are open to all ages). Yeah I've decided. We're gonna do this project for one of our lego clubs.

Why the fake build in the thumbnail

ill do my best to explain why the nickel is bigger then the dime. in the early days of the usa, the coins were worth the metal content, so a dime was made of 10 cents in silver, etc. and we had a half dime, whih was smaller, but worth 5 cents, and in 1866, silver was going up in value, so we moved over to making nickels, which were worth 5c in nickel, im glad this guy isnt sorting the 3 cent pieces and the 2 cent piece. that would make it a lot harder. nice sorter, gets a sub from me

I’d make a ramp leading up to the coin inserter which would also add momentum but still sort them on by one.

anyone notice the thumbnail is not the final piece? is this clickbait?

I came here before you finished and yes I agree, you should have it so they roll more vertical instead of sliding.

For an autofeeder if you have a box with a spinning part in the bottom, like a stirring to push them onto the slide part. Maybe a slightly angled ledge above the pusher so a few fall down there at a time so they weight doesn't just jam the whole thing.

The sizes are exactly proportionate from when they were silver. A silver quarter weighs 2.5 times more than a silver dime. A silver half dollar weighs 2 times more than a silver quarter and 5 times more than a silver dime. A silver dollar weighs twice as much as a silver half dollar, four times as much as a quarter, and ten times as much as a silver dime. Pennies and nickels weren't silver, so their size was not dictated by their weight.

Make it drop into a bigger container so that there is space for more coins, make the whole system less compact and make more room for the slides that move them around, put the whole thing on a shaking platform to force them to glide even when they are dirty, and it should all work 🤗 Then add a feeder 😉

Maybe use Lego motors to add vibration to a coin hopper and make the exit only one coin thick?

You should definitely build a cool and uniform outer-casing for the internal machine (everything you’ve already built) housed within a cool Lego box. You can even include snot brick character elements to enhance the look. Another idea would be to implement a way to add empty coin rolls to be filled by your Lego sorter just like real ones do. Overall INCREDIBLE build. So amazed and impressed!!!! Keep up the incredible work!!!

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen

My pride and joy as a kid was a candy machine that wouldn't work without the right coin.

To help with coins getting stuck down the ramp, try rubbing paraffin wax, or a candle, on the ramp then polish it off with a clean cloth. Good job on the sorter!

thats cool! maybe change the tubes to drop into containers so coins wont jam

This reminds me of my old LEGO projects when I had a huge box full of LEGO. Did very similar things. I vaguely remember doing some coin sorter too.

A working coin lego sorter would be much more impressive 😅

If you want to input a bunch of coins at once you should make a slanted spread plate, where you dump a few coins on and spread them out by swiping the hill of coins around, when they're flat they can slide into a slit at the lowest corner to go into the sorter one at a time. And I'd recommend you make it a rolling sorter, because I built one some years ago and it sorts the coins while they roll down a ~45° slope and lean against the wall of the completely-vertical, 1-stud-wide channel. I got them all leaned on the same wall by letting them slide down a short ramp into the sorting channel.

Dimes and dollar coins are smaller than coins that have a lesser value because of a desire to maintain a scaling property between dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. Each of those 3 coins contains the same blend of metallic alloys (the other coins are different blends.) Further, each of these three coin's masses scale exactly with their values. I.e. a half-dollar has twice the mass of a quarter and a quarter has 2.5x the mass of a dime. That way, any given weight of dimes, quarters, and half-dollars has a set value, regardless of the mix of the coins. If you had some amount of those three coins, any equal value substitution corresponds to an equal weight substitution. You can take a half-dollar from your pile of coins and replace it with five dimes and the value and weight of the pile remain the same.

I respect the random colors

The video had everything except the thumnail

So many people here offered there solutions! Great teamwork all around! 😀😃😄👏👏👏

Great video, but please don't use click bait thumbnail

Amazing bulid with Lego! it may work better if make it a more vertical so the coins could roll and reduce the friction

Reminds me of this book I used to have when I was younger, where it showed you how to make 50 lego machines. It was awesome.

Maybe a light spray with silicone oil and polishing off with a clean, lint-free cloth might help getting the coins down the ramp. Also, a small battery-powered vibration motor connected to the ramp might be helpful as well. Just some thoughts from somebody who tried something similar for Deutschmarks... 😄

I would put a bar across the top to make sure coins dont stack on top of each other when sorting, (like the height of 1 coin) that's how some coins were able to bypass thier respective slots.

make is so that there is a hole in the bottom of a tube/cylinder and the coins drop onto a platform. There is a sliding thing on the platform that pushes the coins into a seperate chute where it falls into the sorting mechanism. This is the simplest way I can think of, and it allows the coins to enter the sorting mechanism one by one

Oh my gosh!! You are amazing. Great job.

One thing to try would be to have a belt system that rests on top of the track you have made, to push/pull coins to their slots, and it would reduce the chance of coins getting stacked on top of eachother, as for the feeding system, it could also work with like a funnel that flattened out, with part of a belt pulling coins in one at a time

For batch sorting, I would have a gently slopped shelf in the shape of a Y which funnels coins to drop off the edge vertically onto a ramp so they then roll down the ramp towards the sorting holes. There would need to be some way to vibrate the shelf so that the coins slowly trickle forward.

2 MILLION WE GOOO

Cool. I had a coin sorter that sorted them into cylinders that were the same size as coin roll papers. I don't really interact with physical money much anymore.

Nice work! I also made one a while back, the 5C and the quarter were also very close in diameter haha

Very colorfull

If you have them flip an roll on ther side you could make it more efficient and save space for sorting

In some of coin sorter, the machine vibrates to avoid stuck coins. It's the same as you slam the desk with your hand.

I built one about a decade ago. My needed extra engineering because I didnt have technic or snot pieces. I cant dump a bunch in, they have to be fed one at a time, but it never jams, never gets stuck, and never sends a coin in the wrong chute. If you'd like to see how i did that let me know. I later made one out of wood based on the same concept that I actually use. The lego one sits in a cabinet.

It kind of defeats the purpose of sorting coins if you have to put them in one at a time. Still, very cool. Good work!

I got curious about this video because I made a coin sorter of my own awhile ago, and to this day I've been upgrading it a lot. It's now the size of a basketball, but as a cube, and the lower half is all for storage (so I don't have to worry about too many coins like you did with the pennies). The upper half is split into to other parts, one that is drawers to actually hold dollar bills from $1 to $100, and the other part is what actually sorts the coins. The sorting system is also vertical, like what you were talking about at the end of this video, and I have no issues with the coins getting stuck or not moving all together, but that also has to do with the angle that the sorting part is at. I know I had to tinker with how the coins are sorted, mainly the penny and dime because of their close size, so I had to actually improvise and make some kinda weird formation that catches pennies to keep them going but the dimes end up falling down. In the storage, I only have pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters (half and full dollar coins didn't seem worth it because I, like most people, don't have many of those), and each coin has about a quarter of the 32x32 (I think that's the size anyway) baseplate that the entire structure is built upon. I've also built a few other compartments, such as one to hold a brick separator, another holds two rods (one's hard and the other's flimsy, and they're for unclogging anything), and the newest one that I added on actually holds my wallet (I thought it was a fitting addition since this whole machine now has all of my money that I have that's not in my bank account). Since I've done so many tiny tweaks to the sorting of the machine, the rods and the brick separator hardly ever get used anymore because my machine is so precise and I haven't had a clog in maybe a year now, if not longer. I've also placed the thing on another identical sized baseplate with a rotating piece and tiles surrounding it, so now the 20lbs machine can rotate on my desk (I had to also place a little grippy pad thing underneath the whole machine because else the base part couldn't actually rotate under it's own weight). I think you got a good start to a great coin sorter, and it was really cool to see another person's perspective on how one might build one of these.

The coins could be guided past the traps on a conveyor belt and a scanner pushes the coin into the correct opening using flaps.

To help the problem with the stuck coins you can put a spinning fan kind to act like a spinning door to push the coins and to make the process smoother

The easiest solutions i could think for the three problems you have are: A lego pouring cone to allow multiple intake but exit of one coin at a time. Allow the cone to rotate so if something is stuck you rotate it and it resumes 2) increase the inclination or add the technic mini wheel instead of just tiles. That might make it a bit thicker. 3) to improve performance pass the coins two times from the sorter instead of once that will help if coins are one over the other

Track should be oriented vertically, with a slight slant backwards, to guide the coins into their correct chute. That's how older vending machines operated to deal with dirty and corroded coins.

Lego neeeeeds to make this a Lego set

This is so fun. I appreciate you showing what went right as well as when it goes wrong

Something like this need to be a set it would sell, as a kid I remember thinking coin sorters were fascinating for some reason.

If you want to put more than one coin at a time, just make the mouth area bigger. Like a longer shoot that starts wide and gets narrow where the coins enter the sorter.

Very cool coin sorter smart designed that have the coins sorted by worth

You could add a very small vibration technique (like a game controller offset spinning weight) to gently shake the machine and keep the coins moving the whole time.

This is a pretty good attempt at a coin sorter, I think if you use gravity better and tilt the slopes further and more steeply, most of the issues of things getting stuck are solved. Also, making a curved path for things that have to go round, instead of slopes falling into slopes will lose less momentum, a sort of playground slide if you will, then getting the whole contraption higher up and having bigger containers will make sure there will be no clog of coins at the bottom. Lastly, having a more stable base shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, the whole thing looked pretty flimsy with the awkward angled legs. This was a fun experiment, thanks for posting it. It might be a fun idea, if you have the time and are willing to re-iterate on your design and make a second or third build after this, trying to fix the issues that you encountered. The whole idea of making such a project is improving while you do it and I think you did a great job at mentioning the current flaws. Also, as a general rule for a LEGO channel, having a nice looking color design is a huge plus. Just invest in the most common bricks in 2 or 3 colors, so you can at least build something that doesn't look haphazard. I'm not a huge brickowner myself, but for such a relative small build, it shouldn't be too hard to get something done in one or 2 base colors. Then again, don't take the criticism too harshly, this was a great idea and some very smart solutions for a functioning first design!

I would add a motorized agitator to the top tray, should help the coins feed better - every coin counter/sorter I've used has them.

If you wanted no other coins in an area, get a cheap vibration system to help

the reason it started having issues was probably less about the coins being dirty and more about the overall weight of the system stopping it from shaking and letting the coins move more freely . you could test again with it emptied out and see if it starts jamming around the same volume

Something like this would be neat for an actual Lego set. Minus the Dollar and Half-Dollar, who even has those anymore?

cant lie this was a fail

I love how a coin sorter is the one that replaced your most viewed video.

this was fun to watch. I'm glad you kept in the parts where the coins got stuck, shows not everything is perfect!

I think if you where to make this into a rotary system with a hopper on top you could avoid them from getting stuck mostlikley and build it into a nicer design where it would not use so many slanted pieces where the coins can get cought on jagged edges. And with that you can also use a LEGO motor to turn the coins.

sould add like a roof that if coins gets stacked they fall behind

This is a cool idea! Keep working on it!

wow this is so cool, now I want to do this if I had legos

3:53 made me chuckle 😂😊

I think that if someone could make a sorter like this in a machine they need coins sorted in but make it perfect so no coins can get stuck or jammed you could just have 2 of them right on top of each other then you probably would have more organized coins

The reason the dime is smaller than the penny and nickel is because the dime used to be made of coin silver and it was once 1/10th of an ounce of coin silver (an ounce being a dollar of silver). Pennies were once entirely made of copper and were valued at a cent and a little bit over (the extra amount of the penny value was supposed to help pay off the national debt). Nickels are (perhaps unsurprisingly) mainly made of nickel and zinc. The quarter was also intended as a silver coin and once had a weight of 0.22 ounces. (being slightly less than a quarter ounce of coin silver). The Kennedy half dollar was originally a silver coin having a little bit over a third of an ounce of coin silver. Of course, today's coins do not have anywhere near the same intrinsic value in metal as most coins are now entirely alloys of nickel, copper, and zinc.

Nice creation @brickstudiosYT !

Coins sliding over the Legos may be abrading the polished finish of the Legos, causing friction

As a child, I've tried something similar, but using weight to select the different coins. But I also struggled on sorting them by value and having multiple at once...

No coin sorter (that I’ve seen for home use) is perfect. This looks like it works pretty decently. One change I would suggest is to make the entire thing taller. This will give you more room in the individual bays to hold more coins. Maybe you can tune it so that each bay holds exactly one roll of whatever the coin is?

Right now you can fix this using gravity you can make the coins sideways it a really good idea, you want to make most of them drop down not in an angle, SO you can make 1 of the coin go around another instead of 2 switching with another this makes it more consistent, and reduce jamming problem. If you can make a thing more simple, do it. complexity is harder to do and comes with more problem.

You my friend, never fail to amaze me, I've been using legos for 10+ years now, & I've never even thought of making a lego coin sorter, I have big tubs of legos, Im always trying to think of unique ideas, & this has never crossed my mind! You're amazing! #LegoGod

You should add a motor that vibrates the set to help with the movment with coins

Just subbed! nice video!

That was a genius build.

The reason why dimes are so much smaller is because dimes used to be made of silver, which was much more valuable than the copper or nickel that pennies and nickels used to be made of.

To dump all the coins in at the same time and get them all sorted just like that sounds very helpful but hard to do. Try EV3 and program it to send coins in one at a time to get sorted.

Maybe reverse the sorting so big ones will not bring the smaller coins with them as well. But yeah prone to jam so might need some power functions like a rotary arm to ensure constant clearance and flow.

wow! cool!

Marvellous engineering and build for something that at the end of the day is pretty useless. I love it. :D

Dude you're awesome I don't know how anyone could do that

Have you ever been to a planetarium? They tend to have a black hole simulator you can run coins on. When it gets to the bottom the coins are moving flat. Coins also don't pile up on each other. If you find a way to use centrifugal force, you might be able to sort multiple coins at once. Try using clear pieces. It will make troubleshooting easier. Maybe make the chambers round so the coins land flat.

For the dirty coins problem, just add soap and water to the slide to make it slippery.

This is impressive because it sorts by size, but then ARRANGES them by value.

How about putting a lot of wheels on top to slide the coins and it uses springs too to get a good grip on the coins Put a slope after each hole so the coins has less chance of going over the hole

I would try to make it work with "wings" instead of holes. (1st wing flips biggest coing out of track.. etc...) That way you can make the track more vertical and coins can roll more than slide. Maybe that helps with a friction.

Wow what an amazing build😎😎😎😎😎

The government is trying to trigger my OCD with the size of the coins

Idea make the fall slots wider and add a big ramp that should work

Great first attempt. Would love to see one with a crazy mechanism like a pendulum dropping coins. I think if the top tray was also at a 45 degree angle so coins rolled and slip, you would get more consistent sorting. Also, why not build it high enough to let coins fall into paper rolls?