Sometimes, you want to build a simple project– the minimum viable product that solves your problem and nothing else. Other times you might be feeling a little extra, and want to use oodles of machined aluminum, six steppers, two cameras, a Teensy and a PC with a GPU just to bounce a ball. That’s the mood behind [T-Kuhn]’s hexa-bouncer, a Stewart Platform on steroids.  You can read all about it on his blog or witness it in action in the video below.  Trust us, really have to see it in action.

The six stepper motors connected to planetary gearboxes each drive an arm. Ingenious linkages allow the steppers to control a ping-pong paddle in every axis of rotation and translation. A Teensy 4.0 coordinates those steppers, but the marching orders are coming from a PC where a Unity application — available on GitHub — is performing Inverse Kinematics using the two cameras to track the ball in 3D. You might imagine a GPU comes in handy there. Both the article and the video get into more detail on the IK.

As for the physical build, as stated, it’s mostly aluminum milled out on [T-Kuhn]’s CNC machine, and while the pieces aren’t actually innumerable, he has to carve out 27 chunks of aluminum for each arm– plus all the bits in the base. The total count is over 300. It’s a very impressive robot to do the very mundane job of ball bouncing, which makes it probably the most overengineered thing we’ve seen this week. Kudos to [Tobias] for that!

Most of the other hexapods we’ve seen have been upside down in comparison, but since the last metal one was a horrifying man-carrying walker, we’ll forgive their misalignment. The computer vision workflow [T-Kuhn] is using for ball tracking is one he pioneered on his octo-bounce robot, which we also covered.

Thanks to [Tobias] for the tip! If you’ve built something so amazingly over-the-top that friends and family question your sanity, bounce it into our tips line! We understand.