4 Responses

1. Tony Warren

   Nice design, I like the approach you take to separate pills of different sizes. How do you deal with weird pill shapes? For example football shapes, or polygonal?

   Reply

   April 29, 2019
   • Sean Rooke

     Hi Tony, Thanks for your nice comment. One thing that is true is that it is impossible to deal with ALL pill shapes and sizes. At the time the Script Pill Counter was designed, we were able to handle approx 90-95% of the pill shapes out in the market. Many of the football or polygonal shaped ones weren't necessarily a problem. The reality was that doing the separation to ensure 1 pill at a time comes down the ramp is the biggest factor in handling the majority of pill shapes. If the pill is too small, or too short (in height, primarily), or possibly too transparent, then our IR detector at the bottom of the ramp might miss it, or at least not catch every single one. Similarly, even with having it sort pills to come down one at a time, the odd time you still might get two pills come down side by side. Overall, however, it did vastly improve general pill count accuracy, and was truly meant to help count larger quantities out for a prescription, and ideally free up a pharmacist's time to do more advising to customers/patients about their prescriptions. Thanks for your questions!

     Reply

     May 1, 2019
2. Winnie Lee

   Hi friend! I'm a 3rd year EE student trying to make my own version of laser object counter that can deal with multiple objects of varying sizes. I'm fascinated by ur spiral mechanism. Could u please share your patent number so I can check out your design? Thanks!

   Reply

   June 2, 2019
   • Sean Rooke

     Hi Winnie, Thank you for your inquiry. We do not have a patent on the spiral mechanism for the pill counter, so unfortunately I do not have a patent number I can share for your reference. Sean Rooke

     Reply

     June 3, 2019