At the beginning of 2007, i got an idea that i couldnt really let go of. I was playing around with some M&M's (dont play with food, that doesnt show good manners :P) and i started trying to make pictures with the candy pieces. I made a connection, pixels from digital pictures are single colors arranged one next to the other, and the M&Ms come in single colors.... So what if i could make a machine that would replace M&M's for pixels? I thought, " well, thats just ridiculous, it would be so hard to make and i would have to deal with oh so many thousand candy pieces" .
I went into my basement where i had a single axis linear roller (picture below), powered by a stepper motor. It was part of a machine that i had started building in the summer of 2006 and the idea just hadnt been cool enough to pull through. I wanted to make a machine that would automatically pour Juicy Juice (Berry is the best) into cups. The idea was kind of cool but not challenging enough at the time.
I realized that this machine could be one of the axis for my robot. Since It would be creating an image, It needs to work in 2 dimensions, X and Y. I had the X, it needed some modifications but it could very well work.
Since that day, I spent hours and hours just thinking about all the different ways in which you could build this machine, which eventually turned into my ridiculous machine.
Ideally, i want to go into the robotics and automation field. With that idea, i added a whole other level of complication to this project. Make it fully automated. You might be asking yourself, what else is missing? its already automatic, it doesnt need anything else. But the question is, what do you do with the M&M's once you are done making the picture and you want to "m&m-ize" another one? You need to get rid of the m&m's on the board and sort them out by color into their corresponding containers.
Click on the M&M BLOG button to see the updated Blog on the machine or the Pictures to see what the project looks like so far.
below is a time lapse movie of one of the parts of the robot being built. 
