I spent about a week fleshing out the plate concept idea. Some things that had to be figured out were:

• How to add pills
• How to remove pills
• How to make it as efficient as possible

I chose to combine the pill adding and subtracting together - using the same mechanism for both. To make this efficient, a combination lock mechanism is used to select the orientation of each "plug" individually using only one motor. The plugs would have to click into place so they don't get dislodged. Here's a project (video:youtube) by Matthias Wandel that shows the basic mechanism. Below is a sketch of my ideas.

The whole mechanism would have to be tilted to make the plate system work, so I make a sketch of the unit.

Now to evaluate the concept.

Pros:

• (Hopefully) easy to load
• Only requires 2 motors

Cons:

• The more compartments, the longer and wider it gets
• Rotating plates need to be changed per pill type

Things that aren't quite figured out yet:

• Rotating plate changing
• Load and pass-through holes can't be at 180 degrees from each other