That's roughly the economics of it. There is a cottage industry where people will sort lego in bulk by hand, effectively it's probably better to flip burgers on a $/hr base.

  mysql> select count(*) from parts;
  +----------+
  | count(*) |
  +----------+
  |    38516 |
  +----------+
  1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The problem is anything but trivial but I'm making good headway, proof of concept took a few months and for the last year or so I've been slowly making progress with a more robust and capable version.

It's a superficially trivial idea, any toddler could do it but to have a machine that does this with any degree of reliability is fairly complex.

If anybody is ever going to try something like this I'd give you just one piece of advice: control your inputs.

Anything you have to deal with in software can eat up capacity very fast so by conditioning your inputs the software can get simpler in ways that really matter.

Excellent question :) Because I'm mad ;)

> and where did you get metric tons of lego?

Auctions.