Hasta La Gadget!

As a fan of robots, videos, and pucks, I was mesmerized by this project. It’s a a cool 3D printer hack that allows you to play a robot in a rousing game of air hockey. The system uses a computer vision component to see where the pucks is, send it back to the opponent, and even set up shots when it loses.

The creator Jose Julio wrote that his daughter loved air hockey and wanted someone to play with. Instead of helping her make friends, he used parts of a 3D printer and a PS3 Eye connected to a PC to handle video capture and analysis.

You can even make your own with Jose’s build manual.

via
3Ders

A few years ago we found out about mighty Roombas that were moonlighting as sumo wrestlers. Jose Julio’s RepRap 3D printer also has a sporting spirit. The robotics enthusiast unlocked his gadget’s potential and turned it into an air hockey player.

The robot has three motors: two for moving its mallet across the y-axis and one for movement along the x-axis. Jose Julio wrote the drivers for the motors in Arduino. He then color-coded the mallet and the puck, installed a PlayStation Eye camera and wrote a program in C to make his robot see. Finally he wrote another Arduino program that predicts where the puck will go so that its motors can react appropriately.

Another neat thing about Jose Julio’s setup is that the table uses two old PC fans to create a cushion for the puck to slide on.

Jose Julio knows that his robot still needs a lot of practice – and programming – before it’s ready for primetime. For instance, it doesn’t know where the goal is, though as you saw in the video it can already score even with that handicap. But Jose Julio says he can easily imagine RepRap enthusiasts making air hockey robots of their own, improving and refining its programming so that robots could have different difficulty levels and even different strategies.

Insert a token in your browser and head to Jose Julio’s blog for more on his project.

[via The Next Web]

Air Hockey robot has a smarter AI than you would give it credit for.

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Your precious iPad is used to being touched lovingly, with swipes happening from time to time as you turn the page on a digital book over and over. As for games, those gyroscopic and accelerometer-enhanced titles see you tilt your iPad all over the place, and perhaps might even involve a furious tapping on select areas of the display. However, how many of you actually scratch your iPad’s screen? I guess the answer would be close to zero, but there is a possibility this might happen with the $12.99 iPieces iPad Air Hockey.

The iPieces iPad Air Hockey will do away with the need for traditional air hockey tables, and no air will pump out from your iPad’s display, but through an app, you can have a mini air hockey session with your friends and family, complete with capacitive strikers. Better get a decent screen protector before you give this a go though.

[ iPieces iPad Air Hockey copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]