As someone who disassembles and repairs hardware, [Aad] eventually ended up with a huge collection of mixed bolts and screws. This led to creating the automatic bolt and screw sorting system you see here, although in a way it is just a proof of concept. Bolts and screws happen to be a useful application for now, but the system is capable of sorting just about any small objects.A bit of machine vision detects the size and shape of each object. Weight can also be measured.Mixed pieces go onto a large conveyor belt, shown on the right. This feeds a few screws at a time down a chute, where they roll onto an illuminated platform.Above the lit platform is a camera, and machine vision is used to detect the size and shape and orientation of each screw. A robotic gripper on a gantry picks the screws up one by one — separating them first if they happened to clump together — and places each in a drop-off cart. The cart drops the object into a receptacle with its brethren, making sure similar ones are grouped together. Watch it in action in the video, embedded below the page break.It’s a great build that shows fancy components aren’t necessary for good results. Servos and steppers are controlled with an ESP32-WROOM board, and a piezo sensor detects screws falling off the conveyor. Some of you may have noticed a repurposed Ultimaker 3D printer serving as the bulk of the system, its hot end having been replaced with a gripper that can raise and lower. The overhead camera is an ESP32-CAM adapted to accept M12 lenses so it can focus on the platform.There’s one more feature worth mentioning — the system also has the ability to measure the weight of a picked object by placing it onto a moveable inspection platform, which can optionally put it under a USB microscope for a closer look. Everything is controlled by a nearby PC, so there’s a lot of flexibility built into the system.We suppose that once all the screws and bolts in a shop are sorted, it only makes sense to sort all the nuts. Are there other objects besides screws and bolts that would be useful to sort with a system like this? If you have any ideas, don’t keep them to yourself! [Aad] would love to hear your comments and ideas, so share them below.