I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.

My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.

It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.

I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hme...

[1] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap