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Published 31 Mar 2018
Sort Batteries
The proposal is for a machine to help recycle domestic batteries by sorting them into Zinc/Carbon, Alkaline, Lithium, Nicad, Ni-Mh categories and with a theme of sustainability/recycling the machine discharges any cells that have residual charge into the machine to power it.
It could also assess the health of cells to decide whether they were actually near new and should be re-used rather than recycled, especially expensive rechargeable cells.
I am thinking here of A, AA, AAA, B, C, D type cylindrical cells that can all be handled in a similar way. I am envisaging a simple mechanism mechanically that has a feeder/hopper into which cells are dumped, they then roll down a chute one by one, and they are scanned as they rotate, to read their labels. Any unidentified cells go into a separate output bin. Identification could be through OCR and text matching or image pattern matching of the entire label. There would need to be an initial 'training' period.
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