Bireme
A customer approached us with a problem. Their fulfillment centers were being inundated with new products that needed to be measured, weighed, scanned, and entered into the system.
Most of this was being done by hand, and in addition to the cost in person-hours, the amount of manual data entry was creating errors that made automating packaging very difficult.
We were asked to propose a solution that would streamline this process.
My first thought was to build the station from a set of welded square pipe components and a sheet metal load plate covering an existing scale.
I knocked together this little 3D printed model to demonstrate how easy to pack and assemble this scheme could be.
After reaching out to some of our usual vendors, it became apparent that welding would break our schedule, so we started to transition to aluminum extrusions.
We added a barcode scanner and tablet interface. After looking into the certification process for getting even minor chances approved for a NTEP scale, we ditched the load plate and just used an off-the-shelf unit.
Several last-minute changes lead to another round of radical simplification. I modified the camera support to telescope upwards, allowing us to dimension larger objects.
After delivering the initial six units for field testing, we sat back and waited for the first round of feedback.
