Tag: Ping Pong

When you think about it, ping pong is kind of a silly game to begin with. You know, a couple of grown adults smacking a tiny hollow ball across a tabletop with all their might does seem a bit superfluous.

Got 105 spare ping-pong balls, and an equivalent number of LEDs lying around? Yep, thought so. Well if you’re looking for something to do with all those random objects, the guys over at Hack A Day have a little spare-time project for you – a ping-pong ball clock. The clock looks a lot like the ones you might see on the outside of a bank, but uses ping-pong balls as the diffusers on top of a 15×7 matrix of LEDs.

Got a couple of fancy quadrocopters floating around? Why not teach them some cheap tricks – like how to juggle balls. The guys from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are up to their flying quadrocopter shenanigans again.

Although playing ping pong without a paddle isn’t really an option (hands don’t really do the trick), I don’t think that using this new case on your iPhone will do the trick either. However, I have to say that it looks pretty cool anyway.

The Wii has had its share of crazy controllers. This is definitely a strange one: it’s a reproduction of a table tennis paddle. One thing’s for sure, if you love table tennis, then this is the Wii pad for you! The TT Champion Bat is made by Shinobii Technologies and will be available for $70 “pretty soon”.

I suppose these fall into the “why didn’t I think of that” bucket of ideas. If you’ve ever tried to play a game of ping pong, you know how tricky it can be to get your wrist in the right position to switch quickly from forehand to backhand grips.

A member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Modlab spent the summer at Willow Garage, makers of the door-opening, self-plugging PR2 robot. Either the Modlab guy was really good friends or secretly annoyed with one of the researchers there, because he decided to install a robot that lobbed ping pong balls at the researchers’ cubicle as a parting gift. For me the funniest thing about the whole prank is the sheer number of balls fired by the robot.

This unique art installation uses a canvas of 905 individual ping pong balls as a projection surface for interactive video imagery. For his work titled 905, artist maybites suspended 67 strings of ping pong balls in a cylindrical formation, with each ball acting as a sort of pixel for projecting digital images.

MAKE magazine fan/artist/inventor/sculptor/prototyper/modern da Vinci Ron Kissinger built an air-powered gun that turns ping pong balls into balls of fury. The gun has a magazine that can fire up to 14 shots. It takes a few seconds to load the ammo – i.e.

Sure, you could be playing ping pong on your Nintendo Wii, but why would you play on a system with a boring rectangular sensor bar you can have a video game console comes with a receiver that looks like a penguin? Thankfully, placing this penguin on top of your television will not cause it to explode, but it will, let you play a table tennis video game using a wireless remote paddle controller.

Why print on boring old paper, when you can get your message across on some nice bouncy ping pong balls? The appropriately named PingPongPrinter can print dot-matrix messages directly onto the spherical surface of ping pong balls. Builders Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group used a Parallax inkjet print head kit and the EFX-TEK Prop-2 controller board to bring their wondrous creation to life.

If you enjoy the occasional game of table tennis on your Nintendo Wii, here’s a way to complete the experience. Check out these ping pong paddles which snap on to your Wii-mote controllers. I’m not really sure why they’re being called “3-in-1”, since I can’t think of anything else they could be used as besides ping pong paddles.

Artists Jonathan den Breejen and Marenka Deenstra developed the interactive artwork, Ping Pong Pixel, a machine which will take in a digital image, then render a huge image using colored ping pong balls. The installation contains a 2-meter by 3-meter display board which is injected with 2700 ping pong balls from a dispensing cabinet which contains tubs of 6 differently colored balls.