Perler Bead Robot

This is very much a work in progress.

The goal of this project is to create a robot which can "print" designs with Perler Beads automatically. The raw material would be multicolored unsorted Perler beads. The robot would accept a bitmap image with some pixel art you'd like to recreate in Perler beads. It would automatically sort the beads and place them on a grid, ready to iron.

So far...

I have a blog post explaining some of my ideas so far:
http://scanlime.org/2011/02/perler-bead-rob