Update: Check out our ping pong robot
How it Started
I had written about Trainerbot robot review. I was discussing this with my friend Harish who plays table tennis with me. Harish is a math professor and has experience in building hobby electronics projects like (a quadcopter, speaker …), we figured building a simple robot should be possible by us.
With his electronics and my software background, we can try and make our robot, if not for anything the experience will be worthwhile. After two weeks and a couple of versions later most of our problems was in the mechanical side and fortunately another friend Simha who plays with us is an expert mechanical design engineer and agreed to join our project.
We started the project a few weeks back ( October 2018), and it has been a lot of fun. I do not have much hardware experience apart from setting up a few devices to automate my house using Home Assistant. I think we have made good progress and there’s been a lot of learning for me, and I figured that these might be beneficial for someone starting their project as well as we hopefully get some inputs from others.
The goal of the project:
Build a smart table tennis robot that has the all the functionality of Butterfly Amicus pro for the lowest cost
The starting point for us is to replicate the Instructables version https://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-table-tennis-robot/
and the modified version in Thingiverse https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2718974. After trying out with the design we realized that it seemed better to go with the three head design and we started looking at Tennirobo and other robots youtube video’s to get some design ideas
Progress
Version 0.01 3d printer was having some issues so we improvised and came up with this
Version 0.2
Thingiverse design with two motors
Version 0.03 with three motors
0.03 distance
