MSRaynsford

I concede the last hopper was too complicated, annoying because I'm seriously out of time to get everything done. I redesigned the hopper to be 6 very long tubes, skinned in paper again to save material. This one holds about 400 ping pong balls rather than the desired 500 balls but in testing I managed to get all my 150 balls out of the hopper in just 10 seconds, well on target for emptying all 400 in the 30 seconds of shooting time allowed.

Now that I'm making assembled versions of the useless machine and no soldering versions (where I do the soldering for you). I find myself trying to solder up 10 pcbs at once so I whipped up this quick little jig that will hold 20 units at once allowing me to solder them quickly and easily.

  I managed to get the skin on the hopper last night. 32 individual sections allow the balls to move freely into the cannon, simply rotate the wheel and drop the next stack into the barrel. It's interesting in theory but it's taking way too long to build so the stacks are only half as tall as they should be. 2 of the stacks were warped, I couldn't figure out why so I just cut them out.

While trying to build the skin for the inside of my hopper  I needed to cut a lot of paper to the right size. I perforated the sheets to make them fold and fit the hopper perfectly but they were taking 5 minutes a time to cut, 5x 32 makes for a long and tedious evening. I decided to try and cut multiple layers at once. It's been a very long time since I last tried this. Previously I tried it with my HPC 3020 which made a real mess of it, the Just Add Sharks lasers have better air assist and better extraction so I was optimistic.  I was able to cut through 3 sheets at once, but it definitely had some issues. The top layers of paper were actually blown around by the powerful air assist. This could be easily remedied with appropriately placed magnets. The bigger issue is that as you get to the bottoms layers there is increased smoke staining. So this method is really just quick and dirty and sometimes that's all you really want but if you're trying to make anyt...

I need a massive hopper to hold all the ping pong balls I intend to fire as part of the MFUKLC . I'm trying to maximize the material still so I've built up this frame work to hold 500+ balls. It's been made from 2mm mdf. I can use the extra 1mm of material in paper so I can skin the inside of the hopper to stop the balls from falling through the gaps.

With the new box design I was able to revisit the double useless machine , this was always a bit temperamental and so was taken out of the shop. This version solves all of the previous issues, it uses the same geared motors and the same brackets as the single machine rather than modified servos (which were the cause of previous issues). The box is the same glueless design so it's really fast to put together and although I haven't been able to squeeze a PCB into here yet but the electronics have been improved. The little switch on the side turns the machine of once both arms are back inside the box. The kit is available from my website as usual

My useless machine design has had a complete overhaul and this is now my best product to date. The new design features a PCB for the electronics which makes it quick and easy to solder, The box is a completely glueless construction and clips together in just 2 minutes, there are just 3 screws holding the components together. Back EMF braking stops the motor dead so the machine doesn't just use the limit switch as a mechanical end stop (unlike other designs) The new kits are available from my web store in 3 different flavours , "Soldering Required", "No Soldering" and "Assembled". There are also 2 more variations due out before the end of the week. This new design has some clever features. The lid hinge is now made up using the sides of the box, the flap rests on top of the sides which prevents it from falling back into the box. The motor mount is a single piece which stretches between the top and the bottom of the box. The PCB can accommo...