Ball-E (Rotating Cannon)

Inspiration

The pirate theme of Hackabull 2023 inspired us to develop new cannon aiming technology for pirates to keep up with the modern world and to enhance their maritime activities

What it does

Launches balls and rotates on a spinning platform

How we built it

Lots of scavenged cardboard. Ball-E has a body consisting of a head, body, and base, utilizing a combination of DC and servo motors to rotate towards targets and launch foam balls

Challenges we ran into

The mechanism to feed the balls into the two adjacent motorized wheels (that provided the projectile acceleration) proved to be quite the challenge. Everything we tried would get caught or jammed due to many of our parts being not of the best quality (scavenged and jerryrigged from scrap and anything else we could find).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finally got a feeding mechanism to sucessfully feed a ball into the two spinning motorized wheels to launch the ball forwards

What we learned

Engineering is a whole lot of failure--trial and error--before success is found.

What's next for Ball-E (Rotating Cannon)

With the addition of stronger servo motors, and perhaps an innovative launching mechanism, Ball-E can become the auto-aiming cannon it was dreamed to be.

Built With

• arduino