Help Me Design a Candy Dispenser
I’m going to keep much of my latest project under wraps for now, but I need your help designing one piece of it.
I’m looking to create a device that is small and light and will dispense one piece of candy at a time programmatically.
Here are the requirements…
- Light - no more than 1oz
- One at a time - it needs to dispense a piece of candy one at a time. If I have to constrain it to hold only round candy of a set size, then so be it, but ideally it would hold candy of varying size and shape. Ideally it will hold Runts bananas.
- It has to operate on a 3.7V power supply
- It has to be an electro-mechanical assembly that I can control with an IoT device (an easy req to fulfill I think)
- It should hold some reasonable number of candy pieces - say at least 10.
So far I’ve thought of the following…
- An Archimedes screw that “pumps” candy up from the bottom of a hopper (like this)
- A wheel that sits horizontal and on each incremental rotation lets one candy piece at a time fall into a hole in the top and lets another fall out a hole at the bottom
- A screw that sits on a horizontal axis that is loaded with candy pieces (one per screw rotation… not in a hopper) and pushes one piece out at a time when rotated 360 degrees. A bit like snack vending machines.
If you can come up with any other brilliant ideas, I’d be glad to hear them.
Thanks in advance.