One of my favorite hobbies is playing with LEGO, and I especially focus on making things function in my LEGO builds. In the past, I’ve built working guns, tanks, RC cars, all out of LEGO. but because I’m a junior in high school now, a lot of my time needed to be spent on school or extracurriculars, so over the years I just left my LEGO collection collecting dust in the basement. Because of the recent quarantine, I had nothing better to do than start playing with them again, so I decided to make a coin sorter to sort my change. It took me a period of 3 days designing and testing the machine, which I based off of a wooden coin sorter I found on YouTube. The challenge was adapting the premise of that wooden machine to LEGO bricks. I then decided to post it on reddit yesterday, and it just blew up, I never thought it would get that much traction.

As you can see in the video, the machine runs on a LEGO power functions motor which drives a work gear to spin the wheel. The wheel has 1x4 tiles on it to “grab” the coins one by one to drop it onto the rail, which has increasing size slots hat sort the coins into their respective compartments.

I just wanted to add that I’m really grateful you guys are considering me to have as a news story! Thank you so much