Send it to your machine

Save the version, then open Machines in Hive and use Assign Profile on your machine. You choose the profile and which version of it. The machine picks up what it has been assigned.

Hive has no button that downloads a profile as a file. If your machine is not linked to Hive, you write the profile on the machine itself instead, and its own Profiles page accepts a sorting_profile.json upload.

Bins are chosen on the machine, not in the profile

A profile never names a bin number. It only says which boxes exist. Which bin each box lands in is decided on the machine.

The first decision is made when you activate the profile there. The machine asks how the bins should start: Pre-assign from rules seeds them in the order your rules are in, and Reset bins empties them and gives a category a bin the first time a piece needs one.

After that, the machine's Bins page is where you change any of it. That page also shows you which bins are the big ones.

A big bin is also the only kind that takes a big piece. Every layer of the machine is either half size or third size, and the funnel under it sets the largest piece that layer can pass:

• A half-size layer, the one with 12 bins, takes a piece up to 8 studs across (64 mm).
• A third-size layer, 18 bins, takes 6 studs (48 mm).

That is tighter than the ten studs the machine accepts at the feed side, so a piece can go into the tub, be classified correctly, and still wedge on its way into the bin. Give any box holding pieces bigger than that a bin on a half-size layer; the Bins page marks which those are. If every layer on your machine is third size, six studs is the working limit for what you put in the tub.

You have two ways to do it.

Assign by hand. Open a bin and pick the category it holds. Do this when a box needs one particular bin, like plates that only lie flat in a large one.

Auto-assign. The machine counts which categories your last week of sorting actually produced, ranks them, and fills the biggest bins first, so the categories with the most pieces get the largest bins. It is a good starting point, and you can then move individual ones by hand.

One box can live in more than one bin. When it does, pieces are spread across them rather than filling one and moving to the next.

How full a bin may get is a separate setting, on the machine under storage layers: a maximum piece count per bin, shared by every bin on that layer. Leave it empty for no limit.

Then do a short run with twenty mixed parts and watch where they land.

Next: your first sort run puts the profile to work.

Back to Build your first sorting profile.