We developed a new idea to sort our pipette tips in the correct orientation. It is summarised in the drawing below.
Drawing of our idea of a sorting mechanism. (Credits: Yuki)
Our idea was to have a rotating wheel in a box full of pipette tips and a ramp, as shown in the drawing on the right. The wheel would bring the pipette tips to the top and drop them into the funnel (which we printed on 14 June), orientate them vertically, and drop them into a ramp that would ensure that only pipette tips oriented upright in the correct orientation would be transported down the ramp to a separate part of the machine where our clamping mechanism would commence.
With this in mind, we attempted to prototype our idea using cardboard.
Process of building and testing the prototype.