Recycling personal project

[demeda1]

Hello all! I want to do a project about recycling 50cm plastic juice bottle and pepsi metal cans.So i was thinking to use a inductive sensor to detect the cans and a capacitive sensor to detect the bottles , but i think that the capacitive sensors will detect my cans too so i have another ideea to use a optical sensor and when the both sensors are sensing the object ,then its metal and when only the optical sensor is sensing the object then its the bottle. But i am searching a sensor that cam detect the plastic .I found that the IR sensors can detect various types of plastics but i dont know whici IR sensor to buy and how to configure it to sense the bottle. Can you help me ?

[zboblamont]

@demeda1 Possibly a silly question, but since any detection method will require space they pass through to be constrained, have you considered conductivity across one axis and a simple microswitch across the the other to detect all objects passing ?

[Nca78]

Hello, even with transparent plastic bottles there should be enough light reflected to be detected by a ToF sensor like VL53L0X. It's more reliable than most distance sensors that measure the quantity of light that is reflected. It also has the advantage of a much better range compared to other optical distance sensors.

You might even manage to use only this sensor if you put it on top to measure the height of objects and you have enough size differences between the types of containers.