One of the worst things about playing with LEGO is cleaning up the mess when you’re done. It’s one thing to just shove everything into a box for you to pick up where you left off but when you’re looking for specific pieces, having to dig through tons of LEGO parts that you don’t need is time consuming and troublesome. However, a LGEO hobbyist has come up with a solution to this problem. He created a machine from LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, Intelligent Bricks, motors, a webcam and a digital scale that can automatically sort out different LEGO parts and put them into separate containers. He programmed the machine to recognize each piece by its weight and shape, and used some simple conveyor belts to push them out of the tray into plastic containers. A LEGO machine to sort out LEGO pieces – how crazy is that? Anyway, the machine is a bit too slow to be extremely effective for now, but I guess you could just put all the unsorted pieces into it, go out of the house and come back home later to an organized LEGO collection. Hit the break to watch a video of the LEGO sorting machine in action: