The Octo-Bouncer

I started thinking about ball juggling machines in the year 2015. I wrote about my first few attempts at creating them in this blog post from the year 2017. In 2018 I wrote another post about my then newest build. We’re now in the year 2020. And finally, the quest to get a machine to juggle a ping pong ball reliably has come to an end (as this current build is able to keep the ball bouncing for hours.)

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Afterthoughts On Arduino Bouncing Ball on Plate Machine

Some years ago I started a Quest to get a machine to juggle. Some weeks ago, I yet again found myself working on a machine with the goal of getting a ball to bounce on a plate without falling down. And bouncing it does. But is the quest now finally finished? Is the holy grail of continuous ball-bouncing reached? The short answer is “No.” and I will probably not spend any more time on the current iteration of this DYI robotics nightmare.

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Scrappy Arduino Pen Plotter with Nema17 Steppers

After seeing a really neat commercial Pen Plotter on Youtube, I decided the time has come to build my own Arduino Pen Plotter using Nema17 Stepper Motors and readily available 3D Printer spare parts.

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Adding Computer Vision to the Arduino Delta Robot

In the previous post, I wrote about how I decided to build an Arduino Delta Robot. In this post, I will show you how I added some simple Computer Vision to the project.

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The Quest To Get A Machine To Juggle

This entry is about the quest to get a machine to juggle a ping pong ball.

I started thinking about a ping pong ball juggler 2 years ago. And it was around that time that I built the first one of them. it uses LED – Photo transistor pairs to “see” when and approximately where the ball comes down. I used 4 micro servos to move a wooden plate.  It’s the machine in the first YouTube video.

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