Ping Pong Ball Pickup Robot

1 Relay 1 Servo Controller 1 Netbook Two high volume 120mm computer fans are hooked to a serial port relay. When on, the fans holds the container flap at the back closed and sucks balls through the tube into the container. To dump the ping pong balls, the fans are turned off and the weight of the ping pong balls push open the container flap. The netbook was running Linux and forwarded (socatted) serial data transfered over TCP over wifi. A custom .net application was written to convert xinput (xbox controller) to serial data to be dumped to the netbook with minimum possible latency.