Collaborate Disseminate
A team at Google has spent a lot of time recently playing table tennis, purportedly only for science. Their goal was to see whether they could construct a robot which …read more Continue reading Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis
We use electricity to move things with the help of motors and magnets all the time. But if you have enough voltage, you can move things with voltage alone. As …read more Continue reading Moving Things with Electricity
When we first caught a glimpse of this ball juggling platform, we were instantly hooked by its appearance. With its machined metal linkages and clear polycarbonate platform, its got an irresistibly industrial look. But as fetching as it may appear, it’s even cooler in action.
You may recognize the name …read more
Continue reading Robotic Ball Bouncer Uses Machine Vision to Stay on Target
[George] and his coworkers like to blow off a little lunchtime steam on the company ping pong table. We might do the same, except it’d just be us versus the wall, and most of the exercise would consist of bending over to pick the ball up off the floor. When …read more
Continue reading Edge-Lit Ping Pong Paddle Lights Up The Fight
There’s something enchanting about the soft glow of a properly diffused LED, and this is only improved by greater numbers of LEDs. [Manoj Nathwani] was well aware of this, setting out to build a large display using ping-pong balls for their desirable optical qualities.Unfortunately, not everything went to plan, but …read more
Continue reading Glitching LED Display Proves Crowd Favorite
We’ve heard of beer pong, but we’re not sure we’ve heard of wine pong. And certainly never wine pong automated with a ping pong ball throwing robot like this one.
There’s not a huge amount of detail available in the video below, and no build log per se. But …read more
Continue reading Trick Shot Bot Flings Balls into Wine Glass Every Time
Four microphones pick up on the sound of the ball striking the platform, and self-adjust accordingly. Continue reading Watch a Mesmerizing Robot Bounce a Ping-Pong Ball Using Sound
Yeah. *hits bong* It’s like that. Continue reading Watching Ice Crystals Form Is Like Coming To Terms With Your Own Existence
There aren’t too many sports named for the sound that is produced during the game. Even though it’s properly referred to as “table tennis” by serious practitioners, ping pong is probably the most obvious. To that end, [Nekojiru] built a ping pong ball juggling robot that used those very acoustics to pinpoint the location of the ball in relation to the robot. Not satisfied with his efforts there, he moved onto a visual solution and built a new juggling rig that uses computer vision instead of sound to keep a ping pong ball aloft.
The main controller is a Raspberry …read more
A spectrum analyzer is a pretty useful tool for working with signals where the size of the frequency components matter. Usually, the display is a screen. Sometimes, you see it done with LEDs. [Mag Laboratories] did it with ping pong balls.
The device uses a processor to calculate a Fourier transform, cutting an audio signal into 16 frequency bands. The processor converts each of these values to a PWM output that drives small fans. The fans blow the ping pong ball up the tube proportional to the fan speed. You can see the result in the video below.
Of course, …read more
