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.

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This is just one example of several pairs of spooky eyes which light up [Vato Supreme's] bushes this Halloween. The quick and inexpensive build process make it a perfect diy decoration.

Each eye is made up of a ping-pong ball and an LED. But that alone won’t be very spook as the entire ball will glow rather brightly. So he spiced things up a bit by masking off the shape of a pupil and spraying the balls black. The vertical slit seen in white above will glow red like a demon in the night.

The LEDs are driven by an ATtiny85 running the Arduino bootloader. [Vato] found there was plenty of space two write code which fades the eyes in and out using PWM. This happens at random intervals for each of the four pairs he is driving.

We’ve seen a similar project that used oversized LEDs as the eyes. But we really like the idea of using a diffuser like this one. See it in action after the break.

Hi everyone!

This was my first CNC and 3D printing project. 

It is a functional ping pong balls launcher designed to be controlled by an arduino (or any other microcontroller). It uses a servo to dispense the balls and two motors with wheels to give speed and shoot them.

All the plastic pieces can be printed using an 3D printer and the bases can be done using a CNC or a laser cutter. Have a look at the thingiverse page: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:29670

In order to build this you will need the following material:

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[George] started with an 8×8 grid, but just couldn’t help himself from upscaling to this 32×16 pixel ping pong ball display. That’s right, It’s a 512 pixel array of fully addressable RGB LEDs diffused with one ping pong ball each.

We featured the predecessor to this project back in January. That one was an 8×8 display using a Rainbowduino as the controller. [George] took what he learned from that build and expanded upon it. The larger display is modular. Each module starts as an 8×8 grid which connects back to the Arduino using a breakout shield with some Ethernet jacks used as quick connects. The LEDs are driven by 595 shift registers, with transistors which protect the logic chips from the currents being switched.

He had a lot of help soldering all the connections for the display and ended up bringing it to show off at the Manchester mini maker faire. See it in action in the video after the break.

Hey,

The ModuPong YouTube channel is about a modular robotics system that tracks a ping pong ball in real-time. In addition, we cover in this channel how the system predicts and responds in less than 130ms.

Please tell me if you have any ideas on how we could make our system better. Cheaper and faster would be great!