Comment by pveierland
9 years ago
One idea for selling the parts would be to keep a precise inventory of everything entered into the system. A precise inventory + a database of the parts needed for any LEGO set would allow customers to order an arbitrary set for a nice price. A total system which would take random parts as input, and output packaged complete LEGO sets would be neat.
Ditto. I think that's definitely what would sell at the best value.
Coincidentally, it kind of simplifies the sorting problem too. Just do like Amazon and don't sort!
Instead, use the machine to figure out exactly what was in that bin you just bought. Give the bin an ID, and store it as is. Then, when putting together a set, have your software find the minimum number of bins you need to pull from to assemble the set. Run them through, and have the machine pull the parts.
This is already possible, but I'm not using it because in some trial sales I've found that sets are rather hard to sell profitably:
- the sets have to be absolutely perfect to be worth something
- you need to check to make sure all parts are present, this is hard enough for Lego which starts from known quantities and brand new parts, with second hand parts and people being ultra picky about such details as year-of-manufacture of the bricks it becomes an intractable problem.
- Rare parts are really rare. In fact, the only parts you would have to document like this are the rare ones, and 'rare' is actually one of the categories that I can sort for. This gives the option to sell only the rare parts for a certain set and to leave the bulk parts to some other method. Much easier to do that profitable.
Gotcha. The gap between hobby-grade solutions and business-grade solutions blows my mind every time.
Can you choose which sets to assemble based solely on the rare pieces you have in hand (i.e. obtained), prioritized by some notion of complexity-weighted value of the set?
Said another way, assemble sets around the rare needles you have stumbled across unintentionally while sorting the haystack.
This is almost exactly what https://www.bricklink.com/ is for. Sellers post the listing of which parts they have, in what colors/quantities and at what price, and buyers can custom-order any permutations they need. To my knowledge it's the most popular Lego parts resale site among AFOLs.
This is all true. But: bricklink stores are captive so bricklink store owners are just creating brand recognition for bricklink, they can't legally sell their stores and bricklink.com has been sold to some Hong Kong entity after the original founder died. Slowly bricklink sellers are being squeezed for more of their profits because the site has critical mass.
And then there is the 'incrowd' which does everything they can to get rid of newcomers. All in all not too impressed with Bricklink in its current incarnation, the Lego group, which used to quietly promote bricklink has gone completely silent on them.
A final item about bricklink that I don't like is that they tend to sue or send C&D letters to other Lego related sites for the use of 'their' content whereas that content is all user generated, it's just that Bricklink overnight went from having all that content owned by the contributors to claiming copyright on images and terminology. They really pulled a Gracenote/Freedb stunt here.
Yikes. I haven't done any meaningful business on Bricklink since before Dan died, and it's always been a somewhat prickly place, as often happens with niche hobbies - but I had no idea how it's gone downhill since. Sad to see, but it does make me feel like I dodged more of a bullet than I might've realized when I decided to give away my own collection instead of trying to sell out of it.
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Wait, how can Bricklink send C&D letters, unless it's actually owned by Lego? It's like Ebay sending C&D letters to Craigslist because someone happens to list something that's also solde there.
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That would require a robotic warehouse as well to pick the orders in a profitable way.
Possibly not, right? If you don't sort but instead use the machine to do the inventory of your bins, then you could have your software tell you which bins you are going to need to fulfill your orders for the day. The big "if" in that scenario is that your machine is not categorizing anymore but identifying. I don't have the experience to assess how much harder it is.
Then you'd go and pick the bins, run them through, and the machine assembles the sets from those bins. That's similar to the way Amazon does it. Now they have the shelves on robotic trolleys that bring them directly to the packers, but that's just a required efficiency at their scale.
I guess the problem with this scheme is that you move the problem from classifying to identifying... twice. So the precision requirement goes up. I don't know how big your dataset would need to be to require minimum human intervention.
That, and you'd waste a ton of time because in such a re-run you'd be looking for a very limited number of parts from a much larger bin. So in the end you'd run around with bins rather than picking the parts from pre-sorted and binned by color and type parts. Either way it is a boatload of work.
The closest I've come to this is where you identify which sets are present in a batch by doing a trial on a sample (that's a pretty easy statistical job), and then sort directly into sets starting from the largest sets down. That way you reduce the parts count very rapidly. So, I did this for a bit and now have 18 60 liter crates of almost complete sets which all need to be manually completed and checked. Again, not profitable.
If you just want to do this to keep busy it is easy, if you want to make more than what you could make by flipping burgers it is surprisingly hard.
How many distinct Lego parts are there? Assuming they're all sorted into separate bins, picking them doesn't seem too hard. I guess sorting + putting them in the right bins would require something more complex. Surely there's a way.
About 40,000 shapes, about 100 different colors.
And picking them is stupendously hard due to the large variety in shapes and sizes.
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