The Office Ping Pong Ball Cannon

It's been almost a year since my last blog post. It's not that I haven't been doing anything. I've actually been doing a lot. I got promoted. I've started and stopped dozens of side projects. I'm getting married in a few weeks. But that's not what I want to write about right now. I want to write about this cannon I'm building for my office.

So we have a stand-up meeting every morning. In our stand-up we have a ball. You're not allowed to talk unless you have the ball. It's a complicated rule, I know, but it keeps the meetings short and simple. Here's the snag. Not all of our team members are in Plano TX. Some of them are in Appleton WI.

We have big TVs and cameras in our conference rooms that allow us to communicate pretty easily, but they don't really help when I need to toss a ball to Wisconsin. When we first started ball rule, we just kind of awkwardly threw the ball at the camera, and they mimed catching a ball and throwing it back to us. I tried buying them some of the same balls we were using, but there was still something missing.

That's when I came up with the cannon. I wanted a device in Plano that I could throw a ball into, and a ball would launch in Appleton. Then when the Appleton guys threw the ball back in, the ball would launch in Plano. It would be like playing toss across state lines. Here are some of my initial sketches:

I drew those sketches back in March. In my spare time, I've been looking at parts, and putting some prototypes together. I've come a long way since those original sketches. I'll start putting up some posts to show my progress.

Now I'm a coder. Electronics are not my forte. This project was more about learning. I wanted to do something that was just outside of technical abilities. There was a lot of talking with co-workers, and looking up circuits online. I'm no electrical engineer. I just play one on the internet.