[Andrew] and his brother had some time (and a lot of ping pong balls) on their hands, so they decided to have some fun and built a remote-controlled ping pong ball turret.
Arduino aside, the turret is cheap and easy to build as [Andrew’s] writeup explains. The firing mechanism was constructed using a pair of foam wheels and motors, which is used to launch the ping pong balls much like a baseball pitching machine. The balls are stored above the wheels in a cardboard tube and released by a mechanical flap when triggered.
When [Andrew] is ready to release the turret’s payload, he sends a command to his computer over VNC, which relays the command to the Arduino over a serial connection, triggering the flap. While the control scheme could certainly benefit from direct, wireless phone-to-Arduino communications, it seems to work well enough for [Andrew’s] needs.
Check out the video dramatization below to see [Andrew] “surprise” his brother with a hail of ping pong balls after the jump.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QR5ErY772eM&w=470]
Like the video! Reminds me of this unfortunate remake of “The Jackal” with Bruce Willis. What a crap movie…
I really hope that is the actual noise it makes
I was thinking the same thing :)
Be careful shooting those ping pong balls near the fireplace. They’re made of celluloid
I was thinking the same….
I remember they burn like hell and create a lot of smoke. My thought was why not putting them on fire ;)
Or only every 5th of them … as a tracer ;)
laaaaaaame… i know i know it’s kind of cool but they should have make it air powered – with high enough pressure it could rip them in half
Wow. somebodys got waaaaaaaay to much time on their hands.
I was hoping it looked like the turrets in Portal..
I would love to harass my cats with this. Great project!
Cool hack but forget trying to sell it to the army, the Chinese already have a countermeasure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDhK0yukBSE&feature=related
and ours was connected to twitter!!
oh fecking embedding:
http://youtu.be/iPG-ji3zt7A
Complex? Its an Arduino with some dumb rubber wheels.. Great project for beginners I guess.
just needs motion tracking…
Great production in that video editing. Good job on the hack too.