Domino ideas

Even though life has been a little slow I have been busy playing a lot of dominos and have come up with several ideas.  The dominos are cast from a ceramic type plastic.  It would be easy to imbed a material that could be activated by a pencil sized laser.  The laser would light up all the doubles.  That way you would have to inspect an average of 6 tiles instead of 45..  The deluxe model would advance the number by one and the correct domino would be highlighted with one flash. This is actually a good idea and would involve "off the shelf" parts and a very minimum in investment to imbed the material into the tile

The next idea would involve the mixing of the dominos after round is finished.  My idea would be to have the tiles pushed into a tilted chute.  They would land on a tilted circular platform that would be activated by a hand crank.  The platform would have a square hole on the periphery 1/8 " larger than the length of an individual tile. This would assure that only one tile would fall through at a time.  A light sensor would key in on the individual tiles and flip each so that the tile  would be oriented with the numbers down.  The tiles would then slide down another funnel shaped chute.  There would be two very thin wires located 6" inch apart along the length of the chute.  this would further distribute the "mix" and orientation of the tiles. (much like a pin ball machine)   The tiles would end on a very slow moving conveyor that would pass in front of each player.  A counter would keep track of each tile removed from the belt.  After 15 tiles had been removed by each player  the conveyor would stop and a thin playing surface would emerge from the opposite direction of the converse movement of the belt.  I have yet to figure out how to construct such a machine smaller than a 30 gallon drum.

It is ideas such as this last one that forced G.E. to get out of the motor business..