Miller Systems - Projects - Seed Counter

Miller SyStems Ltd created 612 projects during its 20 year history. some of which are described below: P1430 The seed counter (October 83) Our Customer took us in to his research laboratory to Show us his problem. Ten girles were sitting round a table counting seeds. It was to aide research into fertiliser development. The seeds were from several plots on which different fertiliser had been used. The only way they had of measuring efficiency of the fertiliser was to count the seeds produced from the plot. They had tried many machines but they were never accurate enough for the purpose. Mind you, Counting by hand was only about 10% accurate because of the boreing nature of the job. The girles wold chat and of course lose count. The prototype of our solution is the Heath Robinson contraption shown here:

Seeds come in all sizes and shapes and it was this that defeated the other machines. In the prototype we uaed the office vacume cleaner to suck the air out of a plastic cylinder with tiny holes drilled in the surface in a pattern of equaly spaced rows. The cylinder was turned using an electric drill and the seeds offered up at one side. The seeds were sucked to the holes which were small enough to be blocked by the first seed attracted. Where apon the seeds were carried round with the cylinder to be electronicly counted at the top The prototype which we filmed, was enough to convinced the customer who raised an order accordingly. The final Machine is shown below.

The first time the customer tried it He counted out 100 seeds and put them in the machine which counted 102. He tried it again and again got 102. So he counted them again by hand. And guess what. There were 102 seeds in the batch. But that was not the end to the development. We Added a treshing machine (on top) and scales below. The whole system was controlled by computer and formed the automated evaluation system below.