Ping-pong ball shooter
A buddy of mine (Thanks, Peter!) gave me a couple of these motor/wheel combos from HSC Electronic Supply. He said that since they were not geared, they weren’t torquey enough for a robot, but after a little brainstorming, we came up with this application…
Just a little shimming to get the right distance between the wheels so that the ball is grabbed correctly, and ZOOOM! This thing really gets a ping-pong ball moving, hard enough to hurt. For anyone else who want to try this, I am using a 5V power supply, but I am thinking 6V worth of NiCads ought to work well. The motors in parallel pull 4 amps on startup and about 1.5 amps no-load. They are quite loud as you can hear in the video, so don’t plan to sneak up on anyone.
I am thinking a tube for auto feed, a solenoid to press the ball into the wheels, a few ping pong balls, a motor controller on each side to allow for spin, and this thing could be really cool.
