The Hexa-Bouncer May Be The Most Overengineered Thing You See This Week

Sometimes, you want to build a simple project– the minimum viable product that solves your problem and nothing else. Other times you might be feeling a little extra, and want …. The Hexa-Bouncer May Be The Most Overengineered Thing You See This Week.

Other times you might be feeling a little extra, and want to use oodles of machined aluminum, six steppers, two cameras, a Teensy and a PC with a GPU just to bounce a ball. That’s the mood behind [T-Kuhn]’s hexa-bouncer, a Stewart Platform on steroids. You can read all about it on his blog or witness it in action in the video below.

The six stepper motors connected to planetary gearboxes each drive an arm. Ingenious linkages allow the steppers to control a ping-pong paddle in every axis of rotation and translation. A Teensy 4.0 coordinates those steppers, but the marching orders are coming from a PC where an Unity application — available on GitHub — is performing Inverse Kinematics using the two cameras to track the ball in 3D.

You might imagine a GPU comes in handy there.