Comment by ChuckMcM
9 years ago
At some point you can completely reverse entropy and re-create the original sets :-) But in terms of just selling off excess Lego looking at the mix of the builder sets would let you figure out a sort of SKU you could put together and sell on Ebay or else where as a 'builder pack 1', 'builder pack 2' etc.
> At some point you can completely reverse entropy and re-create the original sets :-)
Already did that for a batch, about 150 partial sets as a result. Those would then need to be completed and checked by hand, I don't think that can be done profitably, but maybe there is some way.
> But in terms of just selling off excess Lego looking at the mix of the builder sets would let you figure out a sort of SKU you could put together and sell on Ebay or else where as a 'builder pack 1', 'builder pack 2' etc.
Yes, and right now I'm looking for what the contents of those packs should be.
I think your best bet to minimize human effort is this:
* Run the machine over a sample of raw parts, just counting what it sees. Use that estimate to predict which sets can be completely made with high certainty.
* Next choose 6 types of set which can be made, and program the machine to put into 6 bins the correct parts with the correct ratio to form the sets. Anything uncertain or not within the ratios goes in the junk box.
* Now rerun the contents of each box, this time programming the machine to deposit one complete set into each bucket, again discarding parts which don't have a high probability of being correct. Make it beep when it believes a set is complete.
* Now you have an operator weigh the complete set, and if it matches the correct set weight, bag and ship it (self sealing padded bag and auto-printed label), and if not, throw it all back into the input hopper.
Total human time per set should be sub 30 seconds, so assuming a large enough market, it sounds profitable. Assuming 300 pieces per set and 5 parts sorted per second with a 50% failure rate, you would need 4 machines to keep a human busy for the 2nd part of the process. The first part is slower, but could run without supervision.
Assuming you have a 95% part recognition accuracy first time round, and 99.9% the 2nd time (since you are selecting from what is already believed to be 95% the correct part mix for the job, and it's fine to have a very high reject rate), most sets of <1000 parts will be all correct. The weighing step will then probably weed out >75% of errors, and the remaining errors are likely only color related and not so serious.
With this method, you should be able to get major (ie. not colour) errors in sets of 300 to below 3%. Make that lower still by including a couple of extras of common and cheap parts.
For the remaining 1%, just send out a new pack entirely if the customer complains. It adds 1% to your costs. Big deal.
Wonder if there would be a copyright issue with selling original sets as well? I'm not a lawyer, but I believe in the US you can't copyright a recipe but you can copyright a recipe book.
I wonder if though, down the road, you could setup a web site with the complete inventory of pieces that you cataloged, and let people pick and choose what pieces they want for a specific order.
Then just put the pieces through the hopper to pick/pack individual orders. Maybe get a super accurate scale, weigh pieces when catalogging and weigh the end sets to help ensure order accuracy?
Again, I'm not very knowledgable, but I think the first sale doctrine just says it's now your lego and you can sell the lego.
If you start copying the piece assortments ("lego recipes") that lego also sells, that's where I'm unsure that you're in a safe legal spot. Lego put time and effort making sets for specific purposes, and I would think that those "lego recipes" are possibly protected.
Especially if you were thinking of selling a large number of different sets, which would mean you'd be creating kind of a "lego recipe" catalog?
https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html
No. First Sale Doctrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
> Already did that for a batch, about 150 partial sets as a result. Those would then need to be completed and checked by hand, I don't think that can be done profitably, but maybe there is some way.
There's likely someone who's willing to pay X% of the set's price for a bucket that has a 95% chance of having all of the pieces, and a 100% chance of having too many pieces, including some that don't belong in the set, since you'd want to err on the side of caution.
But even that might not be profitable.
I think the problem with this would be to find sufficient sources of random bricks where the good stuff has not already been removed.
E.g. minifigs can get high enough prices in some instances that the total value of a set can be higher if you sell the minifigs and higher value bricks separately, because some people want to buy just the minifig, or need some piece that only appear in a few sets.
This would be my main issue with buying Lego to resell - I'd want to be very sure I'm not buying from other resellers where there'd be a risk it'd been stripped of the more valuable pieces.
Would it be possible to modify the sort such that it counts parts it identifies?
It already makes two kinds of logs, one textual log and an image log, I use the image log to expand the training set, the textual log for debugging purposes.
1 reply →