Planet Arduino

Beer pong is a classic party game involving skill, persistence, and alcohol tolerance. Participating in friendly games of beer pong is a great way to socialize with peers, but what if you aren’t very good at tossing ping pong balls into red Solo cups? In that case, you may want to follow the lead of Niklas Bommersbach to construct a robot that can play beer pong for you.

This robot works a bit like a medieval catapult to launch ping pong balls, but that’s more complicated than it sounds. The target (a cup) is quite small, which means the robot has to be accurate. Like a bullet traveling along a ballistic trajectory, the ping pong ball will experience both gravity and drag from air resistance. The robot has to take those into account, as well as vibrations in the catapult arm that cause oscillations to throw off the throw. Bommersbach had to implement algorithms to take those into account, going so far as to measure the movement with an IMU.

The robot is a combination of aluminum extrusion and 3D-printed parts. An Arduino Uno Rev3 board controls two continuous rotation servo motors that start the arm spinning, then a third stepper opens the gripper to release the ball at the proper time. There is also a vibration-dampening system that uses a complex system of lead screws and gears to move weights up and down the arm to alter the frequency at which the arm structure oscillates, ensuring that those do not interfere with a throw at a specific distance.

There isn’t any computer vision, so Bommersbach has to enter the parameters for each shot. But the result is still impressive and this robot is more consistent than most experienced players.

The post This beer pong-playing robot uses sophisticated math to sink shots appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Beer pong and its derivatives are some of the most enjoyed games on college campuses, but they are not all that exciting with just a few cups at either end of a plastic folding table. Meet the Interactive Pong Table, which was created by Instructables user boregan1. It features a fully-custom tabletop gaming experience with a large LED matrix running underneath the center and 20 total cup zones that can be used to play more intriguing games. There are even arcade buttons surrounding the sides of the table that act as video game controllers when the players just want a quick game. 

A total of four Arduino Nanos were used to build the Interactive Pong Table, with each one being responsible for a single aspect and communicating with the others via the I2C protocol. At the heart is the main controller which handles the central RGB LED matrix and the game logic. It can display fun, animated graphics in the middle of the table and even run classic pong. The cups at either end of the table are tracked with the use of infrared emitter/receiver pairs that change their voltage whenever a cup is removed. This allows the LEDs underneath the cups to light up or play an animation if one is removed. Additionally, the game running on the main controller can keep score of which player has fewer cups remaining.

The Interactive Pong Table is a well-built project that showcases how creative one can be with just a few boards and some RGB LEDs. You can read more about it here on Instructables or see a demo below!

The post This interactive beer pong table is lit, literally appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Wouldn’t it be nice if beer pong could somehow get easier the more you drink? You know, so you can drink more? [Ty Palowski] has made it so with automated, mind-controlled beer pong.

[Ty] started by making a beer pong table that moves the cups back and forth at both ends. An Arduino Nano controls a stepper that controls a slider, and the cups move with the slider through the magic of magnets. The mind control part came cheaper than you might think. Back in 2009, Mattel released a game called Mind Flex that involves an EEG headset and using brain waves to guide a foam ball on a stream of air through a little obstacle course. These headsets are available for about $12 on ebay, or at least they were before this post went up.

[Ty] cracked open the headset added an HC-06 Bluetooth module to talk to the Arduino. It’s using a program called Brainwave OSC to get the raw data from the headset and break it into levels of concentration and relaxation. The Arduino program monitors the attention levels, and when a certain threshold of focus is reached, it moves the cups back and forth at a predetermined speed ranging from 1 to an impossible-looking 10. Check out the two videos after the break. The first one covers the making of the the automatic beer pong part, and the second is where [Ty] adds mind control.

We’ve seen a different headset — the hacker-friendly NeuroSky Mindwave — pop up a few times. Here’s one that’s been hacked to induce lucid dreaming.

Via r/duino

Wouldn’t it be nice if beer pong could somehow get easier the more you drink? You know, so you can drink more? [Ty Palowski] has made it so with automated, mind-controlled beer pong.

[Ty] started by making a beer pong table that moves the cups back and forth at both ends. An Arduino Nano controls a stepper that controls a slider, and the cups move with the slider through the magic of magnets. The mind control part came cheaper than you might think. Back in 2009, Mattel released a game called Mind Flex that involves an EEG headset and using brain waves to guide a foam ball on a stream of air through a little obstacle course. These headsets are available for about $12 on ebay, or at least they were before this post went up.

[Ty] cracked open the headset added an HC-06 Bluetooth module to talk to the Arduino. It’s using a program called Brainwave OSC to get the raw data from the headset and break it into levels of concentration and relaxation. The Arduino program monitors the attention levels, and when a certain threshold of focus is reached, it moves the cups back and forth at a predetermined speed ranging from 1 to an impossible-looking 10. Check out the two videos after the break. The first one covers the making of the the automatic beer pong part, and the second is where [Ty] adds mind control.

We’ve seen a different headset — the hacker-friendly NeuroSky Mindwave — pop up a few times. Here’s one that’s been hacked to induce lucid dreaming.

Via r/duino

If you play beer pong, whether with adult beverages, water, or soda, it’s possible you find it too repetitive or too easy. While one might see this as a self-correcting problem, to take things up a few notches Ty Palowski created a specialized table with moving cups.

The custom setup oscillates the cup pyramids back and forth under the power of a stepper motor, belt, and magnet assembly under the table. These magnets pull on corresponding magnets attached to the bottom of each cup, causing them to slide “like magic” on top of an acrylic surface.

Palowski’s system is controlled by an Arduino Nano with a rotary encoder and OLED interface. As shown in the video below, both sides of the table are motorized in the same manner for a two-player challenge!

If you participate in beer pong, and your skills aren’t up to the challenge, you might be in for a rough time. While “practice makes perfect,” if you’d rather shortcut this process then engineers Nils Opgenorth and Grant Galloway have just the solution with their Arduino-powered PongMate CyberCannon Mark III.

This wrist-mounted launcher uses a time-of-flight sensor, along with an inertial measurement unit to calculate the vertical and horizontal distance to the red Solo cup, marked with a small laser. Bubble levels help users fix the device in the horizontal direction and five programmable RGB LEDs indicate when it’s ready to shoot.

To fire, it pushes a ball forward using a small servo, which is then flung out using a pair of spinning wheels. Distance is set by varying the speed of driving motors, in order create the appropriate shot velocity.