codefoster

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…

1. Light - no more than 1oz
2. 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.
3. It has to operate on a 3.7V power supply
4. It has to be an electro-mechanical assembly that I can control with an IoT device (an easy req to fulfill I think)
5. 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.