Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Playing ping pong with a robot”.
I love playing ping pong, but don’t have enough friends. Thankfully someone has made a robot to play ping pong with me. It’S called trainer bot, it’s kind of like a pitching machine. It’S got some motors in here to fire ping pong balls at you. What makes it special that it can aim the ping pong balls and even better it can apply spin, so trainer bot attaches the one to the table plug it in says hello. You can put about 30 balls up here, I’m going to stand over here.
It will fire ping pong balls at me and then I get to clean them up. One of the most important parts of ping pong is the spin of the ball. There’S backspin topspin sideways spins and those affect how the ball flies through the air.
How, where the ball goes, when it hits the table and most difficult for me, is where the ball goes after. It hits the paddle and to play ping pong. Well, you have to be able to create these spins, but you also have to know how to counteract those spins. When they’re coming at you, I’m gon na try some back spins.
I could ask a buddy to send me some back spins, but the nice thing about trader bot is that it’s going to theoretically hit the same sector of the table each time. So now, if I go down with my ping pong paddle, you see both these back spins. I just go right into the table, so I have to lift this shot up somehow I’ll do a terrible job, I’m just getting murdered by this backspace, and what am I supposed to there? We go.
I got one there. We go see it getting better, so yeah. If I I feel, like I’m doing something wrong with my body, but I feel like that angle of the paddle that was very important in that motion very important and getting 20 I mean asking your buddy to hit you 20 identical shots, so you can get better. It’S get a you know, break friendships, so like every robot, it’s it’s controlled with an app. So the trainer bot app has a lot of stuff in it.
But first you got to connect, connects over Bluetooth. So the first thing you see is a bunch of custom drill, so this is like basically ping pong, the video game. You get a sequence of shots and you got to deal with all of them. You can even like team up with somebody, and you can also create your own spin.
You choose which sector of the table you want it to hit, you choose which spin you want and then you can even find tune each of the specific motors in trader bot to get the exact shot you want and then you just hit start. You get ping-pong balls fired at you, okay, so it’s the ball is spinning like this, and it just goes crazy. So I put my ping pong paddle. Okay, so I need to counteract this somehow, oh, I need to do it beforehand.
How wasn’t that bad? Maybe I’m maybe I don’t need trainer, but maybe I’m good enough of it. This is still an early prototype and this is definitely gon na get better. But what I’ve already learned today is how to deal with a backspin how to deal with a sideways spin. How to do a forehand lots of things that I played a lot of ping pong games and got marginally better at.
I feel like just a little bit of time with this has actually made me a better ping pong player. This is coming to Kickstarter on May 16th, and the early bird price for like the first backers, is about $ 330, which is a lot of money for a robot that only plays ping pong and it does not pick up the balls after it. Fires, the math, but it’s a lot cheaper than maybe hiring a coach or taking lessons, and you know you don’t have to go out and meet anybody. It’S perfect! If you don’t like people but love ping pong and then, if fires ping pong balls at you uh-oh, maybe I should have put it in there.
It’Ll come out, it’ll be fine, this one second, a pair of people ball and the people at all. I don’t think that was such a problem. .