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 [Electron Dust] has a few shots in the video that explain what’s going on, as well as a brief description in a reddit thread about the device. The idea is to spin a ball up to a steady speed and release it the same way every time. The rig itself is made of wood and spun by plain brushed DC motors – [Electron Dust] explains that he chose them over PWM servos to simplify things and eliminate uncertainty in the release point. The ball is retained by a pair of arms, each controlled by a pair of hobby servos. An Arduino spins along with everything else and counts 50 revolutions before triggering the servos to retract and release the ball. A glass positioned at the landing spot captures the ball perfectly once everything is dialed in.

Here’s hoping that build details end up on his blog soon, as they did for this audio-feedback juggling machine. And while we certainly like this project, it might be cool if it could aim the ball into the glass. Or it could always reposition the target on the fly.

What goes up must come down. And what goes way, way up can come down way, way too fast to survive the sudden stop. That’s why [Tom Stanton] built an altitude recording projectile into an oversized golf ball with parachute-controlled descent. Oh, and there’s a trebuchet too.

That’s a lot to unpack, but suffice it to say, all this stems from [Tom]’s obvious appreciation for physics. Where most of us would be satisfied with tossing a ball into the air and estimating the height to solve the classic kinematic equations from Physics 101, [Tom] decided that more extreme means were needed.

Having a compound trebuchet close at hand, a few simple mods were all it took to launch projectiles more or less straight up. The first payload was to be rocket-shaped, but that proved difficult to launch. So [Tom] 3D-printed an upsized golf ball and packed it with electronics to record the details of its brief ballistic flight. Aside from an altimeter, there’s a small servo controlled by an Arduino and an accelerometer. The servo retracts a pin holding the two halves of the ball together, allowing a parachute to deploy and return the package safely to Earth. The video below shows some pretty exciting launches, the best of which reached over 60 meters high.

The skies in the field behind [Tom]’s house are an exciting place. Between flying supercapacitors, reaction wheel drones, and low-altitude ISS flybys, there’s always something going on up there.