Developing Lemon Color Sorter

Abstract

This research is to study and develop lemon color sorting machine designed to help reduce the burden on farmers in sorting the lemons before export. As the price of green lemons and yellow lemons is different, farmers need to sort them before export. Principle of machine starts with loading the lemon into the sorting system, letting them drop into the holes created with the right sizes. The lemons, then, will be forwarded to color sensor system for color detection. When getting the right color value, the color value will be systematically compared with the recorded ones to sort the green and yellow lemons. The result of decision in the system will control servo-motor to turn the spindle to veer the lemons to the exit of desired color. All the mentioned processes are controlled by Microcontroller. The machine can set the color value of lemons in the sorting process, can set the counting system of the lemon in order to stop the machine during the sorting process, and can count the numbers of lemons which have already been in the color sorting process based on their sorted colors. From the result of the experiment, it is found that the lemon color sorting machine can work effectively as it is designed. The average sorting error is 3% and the average sorting speed is 30 lemons per minute.