The Ping-Pong Ninja™ Sam Reilly and Conor McCarthy 7th Period Engineering Projects

Hows it Going It's going alright. We have made the piece that pushes the balls into the “shooter”, the wheel that actually shoots the balls, and we are in the process of completeing the piece that will hold both of these. Once this is done we will mount the appartatus onto a servo and pixy.

What are we Trying to Accomplish? We are trying to create an automated ping pong serving machine The machine will track the player’s paddle via Pixy and shoot ping pong balls at that spot to practice returning serves The machine will be able to rotate to shoot at each corner of the table so the player can practice forehand and backhand Height and location can be adjusted manually (if time allows)

How Will We Know We’ve Succeeded? Our group will have succeeded if our Ping-Pong Ninja™ is able to consistently track the player’s paddle and serve balls at the player’s command. The player will return the balls, thus gaining valuable experience in the art of Ping-Pong while exercising his or her body stamina and mental health. The Ping-Pong Ninja™ will be available to enjoy by all ages and player types.

What is Our Best Idea Right Now? Our best idea is to 3D-print the parts for the Ping-Pong Ninja™ and We will also use a Pixy (photographic sensor) to track the colored side of a ping pong paddle. It will use a servo to aim and DC motors to actually fire the ping pong balls using two wheels.

How Will We Use Our Available Materials? We will use the 3d printer to print out any necessary parts (holding space for the balls, ramps, tubes, frames, etc.). The Plasma Cutter can be used to print out any parts that need to be made out of metal, and tools like drills and glue guns can be used to attach the pieces. The brains of the operation will be an Arduino Uno. This will control the motion of the servos and respond to inputs by the user and the Pixy.

DC Motor Apparatus Spinning wheels powered by DC Moto Ball fits between the two wheels and is launched out, like at a batting cage

Our Task List Design shooting system Make the whole device small enough to be moved easily and not be too bulky Create an efficient funnel design that can hold ping pong balls and direct them into the machine Draft a system that spits out individual ping pong balls at a controlled rate Program motors to respond to the Pixy’s commands of moving side-to-side. Attach the mechanism to a universal mount (e.g. camera tripod) so the system can be moved and stored easily.

How did it go? We spent the majority of our work time designing the 3D printed parts necessary to hold all of the motors, servos, balls, shooting mechanisms, and pixy. We used SolidWorks to design our parts. I also wrote code that used the Pixy and servos to track an object of a certain color and then shoot a ping pong ball once it saw a different color. We were able to get the shooting mechanism to work and shoot the balls pretty fast, and have the Pixy track and respond to colored stimuli.