Design and Implementation of a Color Mixing Machine

- Control systems have played an important role in the development and growth of modern technology and civilization in recent years. Almost every aspect of our daily lives is affected in some way by some type of control system, which has simplified our lives. One use of automatic control is color matching and mixing, which requires specialized and expensive equipment that can only be utilized in industrial applications and for big quantities. In this paper, an automatic color mixing machine was designed, simulated, and constructed to operate automatically, efficiently, and at a low cost. This machine is controlled by an Arduino Mega microcontroller programmed in the Arduino C language. The machine combines Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black) CMYK colors with a white color to create the desired color which is detected by the RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) color sensor. This system is simulated using Proteus software which is a great tool for simulating microcontroller-based systems. Lastly, Python programming language, OpenCV package, and Colour library have been used to calculate Delta E that measures the difference between two colors. The results from this machine was practically acceptable with an error (Delta E) of 12%, 9%, 5%, 8% after testing with four examples (yellow, green, blue, red) respectively.