A couple of us from the London Hackspace got invited to build and demo a machine for BBC Click ( on BBC world services). We threw together a machine that listens for tweets, dispenses a ball into a holding area and then at the end of the show fires them into the audience.
Heres a few pics
Heres the complete setup
A nice closeup of the Ball Holding area (thrown together in half an hour with a glue-gun)
The large-ball accellerator
And sure enough we had more tweets than balls
Tom Scott produced a nice video of the whole setup:
The show is available on BBC iPlayer here
Hello Tom,
Loving the machine! I am building a launcher myself with the same setup (two motors for launching the balls) and I was wondering what the specs are on those things you used here? I'm thinking voltage..
Cheers & Greetings from the danish hackespace, Labitat in Copenhagen!
They were two spare motors that I found in the workshop, I think they were rated for 12V but we were running them at about 21v. We didnt really care if they broke :)