[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.

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Induction cook top provides power too

We’re familiar with induction cook tops but we never thought to power a microcontroller with one. [Thanks Hadez]

Ping-Pong Uranium

We’ve been big fans of the chain reaction demonstration using ping-pong balls and mouse traps ever since we saw [Mr. Wizard] do it back in the day. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, check out this demonstration that is analogous of a fission reaction. [Thanks nateL]

Phone tripod enclosure

If you’re interested in using your smart phone for some photography, [Mike] has a nice wood and elastic mount for an iPhone which you might try yourself.

Bicycle snow tires

Admittedly we’re a bit late on this one. But keep it in mind for next year: you can use some zip ties for added traction on your bike when it snows. [Thanks Rob]

Now you can BE mario

A little Kinect script lets this gentleman play Super Mario Bros. with his body. Now you can have all the fun that goes along with being a pixellated character stuck in a two-dimensional environment (plus, there are shrooms). [Thanks Das_Coach via Slashdot]

All bow your heads in reverence to the Ponginator. This bad boy is a performance robot, mounted to the end of a 3 story tall crane. He makes all kinds of noises, flashes all kinds of lights, and shoots ping pong balls at 170 miles an hour. This thing looks like it would be so much fun to play with. listen to it as he’s talking and you’ll pick out all kinds of Sci Fi sound effects, from Portal sounds to Star Trek sounds. Check out the second video on the site to actually see the Ponginator shooting.