Sorter V2 Documentation

⚠ Under heavy construction

As of July 11, 2026, Sorter V2 is not yet in a position to be built.

The documentation that exists is incomplete. Any given page may be accurate, inaccurate, present only as an example, or badly out of date. We do not yet recommend that anyone attempt to build Sorter.

For the most live updates on our progress, join our Discord ↗.

SorterOS — Tutorial

Your first sort run

Tutorial

Run your first sort end-to-end. Pick a profile, feed a small handful of parts, watch them land in the right bins, stop cleanly. About fifteen minutes.

Everything here happens in the browser. If anything stalls, jump to troubleshooting; this walkthrough does not recover from broken state.

Before you start

  • The machine is powered on and its UI opens in your browser. On the SorterOS image that is http://sorter.local/.
  • Before your first sort run is done: a profile is deployed and the chute is homed.
  • 10 to 20 mixed bricks, plates and tiles, picked over as Preparing LEGO describes. Leave stickered and printed parts out of your first run.
  • Empty bins in their slots. Nothing left in the chute, the channels, the carousel or the chamber.

1. Pick a profile

Open the UI → Profiles → click activate on Presort. Presort has eight categories plus a catch-all "Other", so nothing falls through.

2. Confirm the dashboard is ready

Back on the home dashboard, check:

  • Lifecycle: READY (not PAUSED or RUNNING).
  • All cameras live — every tile shows a moving image.
  • Chute homed. If not, Settings → Chute → Home to Endstop.
  • Carousel idle — no part visible in the dropzone.

3. Load five parts

Place five parts loosely in the feeder hopper. Not the whole pile — five is slow enough to spot trouble before it compounds.

4. Start the run

Click Start run. Lifecycle: READY → PAUSED → RUNNING. Within about ten seconds you should see the feeder agitating, parts appearing in a C-channel, and the first one highlighted in that channel's camera view.

Nothing happening? Stop the run and see troubleshooting.

5. Watch one part go through

The five transitions you should see, in order:

  1. feeder: idle → feeding
  2. classification: idle → detecting
  3. classification: detecting → snapping. A pause of a second or two: the machine is sending the picture away to be identified. What leaves the machine covers what goes.
  4. distribution: idle → positioning → ready
  5. distribution: ready → sending, and the chute drops the part into a bin.

If it stalls in detecting, see Carousel keeps rotating past the part.

6. Drain the rest

Once the first part lands, top up the hopper with the remaining parts. Expect 4 to 8 parts a minute on a first run. Do not hand-feed the carousel unless your machine setup is Operator-fed carousel; on any other setup the machine does not expect it.

7. Check a bin

When the dashboard shows no pending work, Stop run. Open the Bricks bin — it should contain only bricks. A misroute is a classification accuracy issue, not a machine failure; flag it from Classification Samples for later.

8. Shut down clean

Remove any part still sitting in a C-channel, the carousel or the chamber. A part left behind confuses the next run's first frames.

Leaving the machine switched on is fine. When you do want it off, shutting down the machine is the safe way; cutting power while it runs can corrupt the card.

The finished result

A bin with only the one category in it, and the machine stopped cleanly.

Photo of a bin lifted out of its bay after a first run, holding only bricks.

What you learned

The full happy path: profile, start, feed, classify, distribute, check, stop. Every run uses the same five transitions.

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