Honey Capsule Filling Machine
Designing and building a semi-automatic benchtop machine to fill pharmaceutical capsules with raw honey
Overview
Filling honey capsules by hand does not scale. This project is a benchtop semi-automatic filling machine built from scratch, designed to dose raw honey into size 000 pharmaceutical capsules with consistent fill volume and controlled temperature throughout the fluid path.
The critical constraint is the product. Raw honey must stay below 40 degrees Celsius or the enzymes that justify the raw label degrade. Temperature control is not a secondary concern, it is the most important subsystem on the machine.
How It Works
One operator loads a tray of open capsule bodies, presses start, and the machine indexes the tray under a heated peristaltic nozzle and fills each capsule. The operator then seats the caps manually. That is V1.
The peristaltic pump is the right choice here: nothing mechanical ever touches the honey, dose is controlled by stepper steps per cycle, and the tubing is a consumable that gets replaced on a schedule.
Heating is a two-zone closed loop. A PID running on the ESP32 holds the honey at target temperature from reservoir to nozzle. A hardware thermal cutoff acts as a backstop independent of firmware.
Status
Early design and planning phase. The build follows a phased approach where each stage produces something testable before the next begins.